Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning 9780367437893, 9781003005797

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“A lively, consistently instructive guided tour of some of the most intriguing ways writers have presented twins and twinship over the past four centuries. Wieland Schwanebeck comes up with a remarkable range of different ways to think about twins—as the same yet different, as shadow selves, as clones, as our missing halves, as challenges to our personal identity—and an equally remarkable number of ­areas— Shakespearean comedy, Victorian detective fiction, literary adaptation, popular fictional genres, pornography, behaviorism, genetics, criminology, eugenics, ethnography, biopolitics, literary production and ­interpretation—that are illuminated by their handling of twins. Readers are certain to agree with him that ‘once you have grasped twinship, you can never not see it again’”. Prof. Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware

Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning

Unlike previous efforts that only address literary twinship as a footnote to the doppelganger, this book shows how twins have been instrumental to the formation of farce, detective novels, and dystopian science fiction. The individual case studies demonstrate how the twin was repeatedly (re-)invented as a pathological and cultural 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 Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Priest, William Shakespeare, and Zadie Smith. Wieland Schwanebeck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at TU Dresden (Germany). His research focuses on British literary history, impostors and con men, cinema, and adaptation. He has co-edited the Metzler Handbook of Masculinity Studies (2016) and, most recently, Patricia Highsmith on Screen (2018).

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Cultural Evolution and its Discontents Robert Watson California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels Exiled from Eden Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel Marta Puxan-Oliva Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art Frances Restuccia Conceptualisation and Exposition A Theory of Character Construction Lina Varotsi Knots Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Jean-Michel Rabaté Double Trouble The Doppelgänger from Romanticism to Postmodernism Eran Dorfman Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning Wieland Schwanebeck

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ literature/series/LITCRITANDCULT

Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning Wieland Schwanebeck

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Wieland Schwanebeck to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-43789-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00579-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

In loving memory of Greta & Clara

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

xi xiii

1 Introducing Twins 1 2 Conceiving Twins 21 3 Confusing Twins 50 4 Appropriating Twins 92 5 Detecting Twins 133 6 Multiplying Twins 181 7 Untangling Twins 221 Index

235

Figures

1.1 Split-screen technique as cinematic twinship (Sisters) 17 2.1 A  mbiguous embraces (Wolveridge 1671, 70; Mauriceau 1673, 250b) 36 3.1 Monstrous children (Anon. 1684/1700, n.p. and 182) 69 4.1 Off-screen body doubles indicate twinship (Our Relations) 108 4.2 Repeated use of the double-take (Our Relations) 109 4.3 “Take a look through that!” Stan and Ollie get duped (Our Relations) 110 4.4 The two Sadies confront each other in the bathroom (Big Business) 114 4.5 Back to the egg (Angoor) 117 4.6 I mpaired vision (Angoor) 118 4.7 Musical twinning in The Boys from Syracuse (Rodgers/Hart/Abbott 1965, 21) 120 4.8 Duplicitous twinning in the adverts for Legend 127 5.1 The reduplicated Kinski (Creature with the Blue Hand) 136 5.2 Olivia de Havilland and her uncanny twin (The Dark Mirror) 139 5.3 Labelling twins (The Dark Mirror and Through the Looking-Glass, details magnified) 147 5.4 X marks the spot (The Playhouse) 147 5.5 Twins as quotation marks: the Grady sisters (The Shining) cast a long shadow 151 6.1 Borden’s twin is obscured from view (The Prestige) 183 6.2 The Ouroboros (Anon 2012) and its typographic descendant 184 6.3 Posters for The Boys from Brazil and The Prestige 202 6.4 Efficient breeding marks the happy ending (Twins) 205 7.1 Austin Powers and his twin fantasy (Austin Powers in Goldmember) 225 7.2 The ‘twincest’ dream runs amok (Dead Ringers) 227 7.3 Thomson & Thompson in the loop (Hergé 1950/1977, 29) 232

Acknowledgements

This project took nearly five years to complete – time enough to learn that being the sole author of a book does not mean that writing it must be a completely solitary and autonomous endeavour. I have spent the last few years as part of a team working at the Chair of English Literatures in Dresden, which I have immensely enjoyed, because it meant working alongside a number of people whose feedback, help, and company I have greatly depended upon throughout this period: Tatiana Ageeva, Mirjam Frotscher, Anika Goldhahn, Bettina Jansen, Andrea Kiel, Ulrike Kohn, Moritz Maier, and Gesine Wegner. The book has also benefited from input provided by the students who took part in my seminars on farce, detective fiction, and adaptation, not to mention those colleagues and friends who pointed me to material that would otherwise have escaped my attention. This includes Thomas Leitch, Kyle Meikle, Anja Müller, as well as the members of the shared research colloquium of the universities of Bamberg, Bochum, Dresden, and Siegen. I owe a particular debt to Stefan Horlacher, who supervised this project patiently and who had the wisdom of scrutiny when it was approaching the ‘point of no return.’ Katja Kanzler and Ralf Schneider provided additional valuable feedback on Mis-Conceptions, the Post-Doc thesis that I submitted in Dresden in 2018 and from which this book has emerged. I am grateful to TU Dresden’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, who generously funded the manuscript preparation. Jennifer Abbott and Mitchell Manners at Taylor & Francis were instrumental in bringing the book into a publishable form, as was Laura Park, who rectified more of my stylistic blunders and mannerisms than she would ever admit. Any fault still to be found in the book is entirely my own. To Rita, Justus, and Nora: I owe the three of you a heartfelt thankyou, not just for making life inside and especially outside of academia so much better, but also for embarking on this twin adventure with me, in ways none of us could have predicted five years ago. We may look a little bruised and battered, but we have made it. The book contains material previously published in two journals; the respective passages are here reprinted with kind permission of Taylor & Francis and McFarland.

xiv Acknowledgements Parts of Chapter 4 appeared as “The Twin Who Came from Abroad: The Comedy of Errors and Transcultural Adaptation” in Shakespeare (DOI:10.1080/17450918.2019.1636854, www.tandfonline.com); parts of Chapter 5 appeared as “The Notting Hill Mystery (1865) and the Specter of Twinship in Early Detective Fiction” in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring 2018). © 2018 Executive Editor Janice M. Allan; Managing Editor Elizabeth Foxwell; Consulting Editor Margaret Kinsman (by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640, www.mcfarlandbooks.com).

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

2  Introducing Twins 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

Introducing Twins  3 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

4  Introducing Twins 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

Introducing Twins  5 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 much is down to a matter of perspective, the possibility of inversion inscribed into the twinned body right from the beginning – and you can make a quite different case. According to recent scientific estimates, far more of us were originally conceived as twins without being aware of it, 2 and in a more abstract sense, we are all twins, born from the division of cells: “All life is replication. Of twinning are we born” (Lash 1993, 27). Viewed in this fashion, twinship is not nature’s anomaly, quite the contrary. The idea that we are all in search of our vanished twin resonates well with the Platonic view, put forward in the Symposium (c. 385–370 B.C.), that human beings used to have four hands, four feet, and two faces, before they were cut in half as punishment for being disrespectful to the gods. According to Plato’s account, the fundamental

6  Introducing Twins trauma of having been split in the middle condemned human beings to ceaseless wandering in search of their missing half: “Whenever one of the two died and the other was left alone, the survivor would look for another mate to embrace, either the half of an original woman, as we now call it, or the half of a man” (2008, 191b). Plato’s account is a neat summary of many of the themes associated with twinship, including the alleged state of bliss and harmony which can only be experienced within the geminate cell, the idea that other forms of relationships outside this cell are but pale imitations of the idealised bond, as well as the implicit claim that twins never really adapt into larger social structures, deriving comfort from each other’s company exclusively. A version of Joseph Campbell’s ‘monomyth’ is at the heart of such narratives: the blissful state of equilibrium in the womb gives way to enforced separation (departure), the twins face trials and tribulations in order to recapture their prenatal union (initiation), and they eventually produce a kind of transcendental version of it, which may involve death (return). Frequently, the narratives quite literally start ab ovo, that is: in the amniotic sac, where blissful Platonic unity reigns supreme. Stasha, one of the twin narrators in Affinity Konar’s novel Mischling (2016), recalls how she and her sister “were afloat in amniotic snowfall, two rosy mittens resting on the lining of our mother” (3), while Georgia and Bessi, the protagonists in Diana Evans’ 26a (2005), emerge from a spiritual world of joint wandering. Both of these episodes culminate in a violent disruption when doctors tear the babies into the harsh light of the delivery room. The first chapter of 26a highlights the brutality of the event: “There were screams and a feeling of being strangled. Then a violent push and they landed freezing cold in surgical electric white, hysterical, blubbering, trying to shake the shock from their hearts” (­Evans 2005, 4). As these accounts imply, the delivery must necessarily produce traumatised individuals who spend their lives hankering for the absolute intimacy of their prenatal existence; a defining void that spawns their individual quests as if to illustrate an argument frequently made by psychoanalytic literary scholars that literature “presents a detailed account of mankind’s chronic incompleteness” (Hallam 1981, 4). The split becomes manifest in diverse ways in twin narratives, for instance, by the twins taking turns narrating. Mischling alternates between Stasha’s and Pearl’s perspective; Evans’ 26a briefly drops its heterodiegesis in favour of a first-person account once Bessi’s twin sister Georgia has committed suicide; and the ‘Jean-Paul’ brothers in Michel Tournier’s Les météores (Gemini, 1975) adapt the roles of individual narrators as soon as they have lost their symbiosis, having transformed into “[t]he twinless man in search of himself” who “finds only shreds of his personality, rags of his self, shapeless fragments of that enigmatic being, the dark, impenetrable center of the world” (204). While there is a modicum of hope for twins to fill the void, there is next to none for sole survivors suffering

Introducing Twins  7 from ‘vanished twin’ syndrome. Meanwhile, the rest of us are not even made privy to a tiny glimpse into the sacred realm of twinship. The housekeeper in Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale has an epiphany to that effect when she ponders that all singletons are mere “amputees” from the perspective of a twin (2006, 83). The implication is that we all suffer from a version of the traumatic split, with the Platonic ideal feeding into the psychoanalytic belief that identity is per se deficient. Thus, Lacanians will insist on the moi/je divide and poststructuralists argue that only frantic activity will compensate for this eternal lack of stable, monolithic self-hood: Judith Butler has taught us that gender must be produced through iterable gestures, while Gilles Deleuze insists that only repetition can provide “the key to understanding difference” (de Nooy 2005, xvii). If it is true that we all seek the long-lost twin sibling who may only exist as a phantasmagoric shape, this also makes murder suspects of most of us. Right from the beginning, we engage in a struggle for nutrients, space, and power, which only one party can survive. By implication, a singleton commits fratricide before s/he has even seen the light of day. Tournier’s Gemini, the most comprehensive and layered twin novel of the twentieth century, takes its cue from this argumentative inversion and its near-transcendental romanticisation of the geminate cell: Every pregnant woman carries two children in her womb. But the stronger will not tolerate the presence of a brother with whom he will have to share everything. He strangles him in his mother’s belly and, having strangled him, he eats him, then comes into the world alone, stained with that original crime, doomed to solitariness and betrayed by the stigma of his monstrous size. […] We [twins] alone, you understand, are innocent. We alone came into this world hand in hand, a smile of brotherhood on our lips. (Tournier 1975/1998, 142) No wonder, then, that twin encounters make for uncanny experiences, for they serve as reminders of our own repressed, guilty past; I will revisit this idea again in the chapter on Victorian literature. The shock of encountering your twin is similar to the one of “hear[ing] yourself on a recording” for the first time, when “the subtle non-you things” stand out to the speaker but to no-one else (Wright 1997, 158). Yet there is more to it than the devouring and massacring of your own flesh and blood. For every ghostly Grady girl in a Stephen King adaptation (The Shining, 1980)3 and for every clairvoyant, epileptic sister in a Daphne du Maurier story (Don’t Look Now, 1971), there is a Shakespeare play, a light-hearted young-adult story, or even an Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy (Twins, 1988) to remind us that there is something fundamentally funny about twinship. Even before these comic

8  Introducing Twins narratives conclude with reconciliatory embraces as well as brotherly or sisterly affirmations of mutual love and completeness, we have laughed – not in spite, but because of the presence of twins. Henri Bergson, in his seminal essay on Laughter (1900), remembers an observation Pascal includes in his Pensées (1670): that two faces that are alike “make us laugh together, on account of their likeness”. Bergson argues that the reason we find this funny is that we suspect some secret mechanism at work here, for “really living life should never repeat itself” (1900/1994, 82). The underlying repetitive and serialised structure of many jokes (“A rabbi, a minister, and a priest walk into a bar …”) supports his point. One might wonder why German Romanticism, then, with its abundance of uncanny doppelgangers and lifeless automata, finds so little to laugh about in twins and limits itself to playing the sombre notes of this theme, and why it has largely been the Anglo-American literary tradition that has exploited the twin’s comic potential. It is similarly hard to reconcile a lot of popular culture with the general sense that twin narratives ‘owe’ us a happy ending. No doubt improvements in prenatal medicine helped to redefine the twin pregnancy as a happy occasion throughout the twentieth century, and recent polls and surveys show a predominantly positive attitude towards twins. At the same time, parents are more likely to be asked about how they will cope with the inevitable problems and stress of raising twins than about their happy anticipation (see Stewart 2003, 124–130). This usually entails questions about the mundane realities of raising twins, but it goes deeper than this. How will you deal with being excluded from the geminate universe shared by your offspring? What about the gnawing suspicion that the twins, who are likely to develop their own secret language, are constantly plotting against you? And just how will you stop them from being at each other’s throats all the time? Popular culture has enormous fun tapping into these fears and mixing contradictory registers; psychological horror fiction, to name but one example, milks the theme for all its uncanny potential. Sarah, the narrator in S.K. Tremayne’s The Ice Twins (2015), is frightened of her daughters to begin with, but when one of them dies and the other twin gradually loses her sense of identity, the mother’s mental health is severely affected, too. It is impossible to keep track of all the ghostly manifestations of twins who scare the living daylights out of their parents and friends, not to mention the countless comedies that habitually stigmatise their token weirdo characters as prenatal twin-killers. Dwight Schrute in NBC’s long-running sitcom The Office (2005–2013) is a case in point. He takes pride in having “resorbed the other fetus. Do I regret this? No, I believe his tissue has made me stronger. I now have the strength of a grown man and a little baby”. Of course, this says little about the nature of twinship and much more about typical strategies of denoting otherness, often with racist

Introducing Twins  9 subtexts, so that twinship becomes a signifier that routinely denotes people who all ‘look the same’ anyway. Minor characters who admit to having eaten their twins in utero are frequently ethnic outsiders to begin with, like Lilly Onakamura in the Pitch Perfect franchise (2012–2017), or ‘Señor’ Ben Chang in the critically acclaimed sitcom Community (2009–2015), who, having absorbed his unborn twin, celebrates his birthday “to remember that I’m a winner.” Their prenatal ‘cannibalism’ merely re-­emphasises what is clear from the beginning: that the Other cannot be trusted. These darkly comic moments in family-friendly entertainment formats feed into a hypothesis that will resonate throughout the subsequent chapters of this book: the comic twin and the scary twin cannot be separated, for they are really only two sides of the same coin. The Shakespearean screwball character who struggles to catch up with the farcical developments around him always suspects demonic interference, and even the cloned harbingers of doom that populate horror fiction frequently provoke a gut reaction that borders on laughter. Daphne du Maurier’s protagonist in Don’t Look Now, who brings about his own doom when he ridicules the clairvoyant old twin and fails to read her prophecy correctly, is not the only one to appreciate the irony inherent in the punch-line structure of his own morbid death scene: “What a bloody silly way to die”, he reasons in the novella’s last words (51). I will, for the moment, ignore the generic split between ‘comic’ and ‘serious’ modes of twin literature and explore some of the cultural coordinates that the twin phenomenon is embedded in as a “cultural hotspot” (de Nooy 2005, xvii). What it always indicates, no matter if one looks at comedies of mistaken identity, young-adult novels, detective fiction or neo-Gothic horror tales, is the conviction that there is aesthetic potential to be exploited. Here we find “sameness and symmetry [embodied] in the human form as literally and precisely as nature permits” (Schoeller 2012, n.p.), and the discovery of symmetry has been integral to the formation of art and in the evolution of aesthetics (see Hahn 1998, 3–8). How exactly this aesthetic potential is exploited is up to the individual text, of course, and this book will by no means deliver an exhaustive account of all the diverse semantisations that the twin motif has undergone throughout cultural history. As signifiers of difference and of broken symbiosis, twins lend themselves to narratives of family reconciliation, the most well-known of which is Erich Kästner’s frequently adapted young-adult novel, Das doppelte Lottchen (Lottie and Lisa, 1949). They also emblematise nation-building and are frequently included in foundational myths, no matter how unsound they may be. The 2014 Eurovision Song Contest featured an appearance of the Tolmachevy twins, two Russian sisters who performed a song (“Shine”) that bore a none-too subtle message (sample lyric: “maybe there’s a day you’ll be mine”) in the direction of Ukraine, just two months after the annexation of Crimea,

10  Introducing Twins the alleged inseparability of the two nations finding its visual emblem in the corporeal presence of the twin performers.4

Aims and Structure This book is not about the complete and unabridged history of literary twinship, for two major reasons: such a history would inevitably be one marked by long gaps, and there cannot be a concise and straightforward historiographic account of literary twinship as there is no singular notion of the twin that permeates all of the term’s manifestations. What the Renaissance calls a twin differs from what the nineteenth century calls a twin. Sometimes the twin is a biological conundrum that threatens to expose the arbitrary laws of dynastic kinship, sometimes an epistemological problem that challenges the Victorian age’s attempts to impose clear-cut definitions, and in another context (that of poststructuralist philosophy) the twin serves both as the ultimate dystopian signifier and as a subversive brother-in-arms, as when it joins forces with the clone to parody “the original, as its ironic, grotesque version, the way Napoleon III was, in Marx’s view, the grotesque double of Napoleon I” (Baudrillard 1997/2002, 201). If this book occasionally resembles literary historiography it is because, admittedly, the individual case studies are arranged in more or less chronological order and trace the development of the category of twinship over time, and it would be inaccurate to deny that some historical insight is to be gained in the process. Slavoj Žižek is one of many to observe that the double, one of the twin’s close affiliates, mostly comes in comic manifestations until the eighteenth century and the Kantian revolution, when the idea of perceiving oneself “as object” turns into a horrific thought: “encountering one’s double or being followed and persecuted by him is the ultimate experience of terror, something which shatters the very core of the subject’s identity” (Žižek 2000, 315). At the same time, I am not convinced that Žižek or Baudrillard do justice to the topic when they simply historicise twins as the comical prologue to the uncanny horrors of the double, for the very reasons previously outlined. There is always, to paraphrase a mathematical pun from T.W. Robertson’s play Ours (1866), something “odd” about twins, for the very reason that they are not odd but “even” (73). Throughout this book, I will show how the twin was repeatedly (re-) invented as a cultural and pathological type while other discursive areas like criminology and eugenics constituted themselves or served as the battleground for ideological disputes, and it is amid these discursive processes that I locate literary twinship. My goal is thus not to demonstrate that literature ‘mirrors’ scientific debates of the day, quite on the contrary. Not only is it evident that literature frequently prefigured many of the discussions raging in modern twin scholarship, it has also been

Introducing Twins  11 instrumental in facilitating these debates and in contributing to the negotiation of power shifts, for instance, by setting the stage for debates regarding kinship systems in the Shakespearean age, by engaging in the Victorian reformulation of the field of crime and the early discourse on genetics and hereditary traits, or by contributing to the dystopian shape of cloning discourse in the twentieth century. At the same time, there is something to be said for the significance of twinship in literature that goes beyond the sheer reiteration of the motif itself. Twinning leads us down the spiral double helix of (literary) creation to the roots of the most diverse phenomena, some of which emerge as traditional genres (the stage farce, the detective novel), while others (adaptation) are located beyond genre. But they all hark back to figures of twinship which are present at their inception, far from the desexualised, narcissistic form of “schizogenesis” that “go[es] from the same to the same” and which Baudrillard bleakly characterises as the epitome of standstill and dehumanisation (1990, 168). As though to confirm their status as divine and incestuous ‘givers of life,’ twins were crucial in the formation of all of them, performing a kind of literary midwife service. Evidently, twinship signifies so much more than sameness and conformity; where there is twinship, there is (cell) division and thus a way forward. Deleuze’s rephrasing of Nietzsche is fruitful here: we are not talking about an actual ‘eternal return of the same,’ but a “return of the Similar” (Deleuze 1990, 264). Poststructuralist philosophy, which is going to feature prominently in my chapter on the cloning debate, is curiously reluctant to follow, however, and tries to have its cake and eat it: subverting the questionable binary on which our understanding of original creation rests but being, at the same time, quick to rediscover its love of the auratic original when it sees the latter come under threat by cloning. Dubious as the origins of twinship are often rendered both in medical literature and in fiction, the idea of the ‘monstrous’ birth permeates not just the history of twinship but also that of literary history as such. Exactly how these paradigm shifts unfolded in several different eras of literary and cultural history will be investigated by way of a discursive analysis that plots my individual case studies against scientific discourses. The twin motif clearly did not unfold in a vacuum, outside the jurisdiction of other twin scholarship, and I will explore the various intersections between literature and science in ways that existing literary scholarship has so far neglected to investigate. At the same time, exploring twin literature will produce some insights into the ‘labour pains’ of literature and of literary analysis, and this means that the study also goes beyond a discussion of twinship itself. Where existing literary scholarship placed the emphasis on reading twin tales as distinct manifestations of authorial preoccupations or of the writer’s ‘vanished twin’ syndrome and survivor guilt, I am more intrigued by

12  Introducing Twins what this kind of interpretative work reveals about our understanding of literature and the act of reading. Clearly, we intuitively seek out differences and opposites in order to structure our sense-­making operations; in a way, all our reading is twinned reading. It is easy to marry this observation to (post-)structuralist accounts of the textual sign system, not just with regard to the split nature of the linguistic sign which, by necessity, must exceed the individual author’s grasp. Meaning comes about ex negativo, by not meaning something else, just as the twin is perceived as the one who is not the other twin. This supplementary logic structures twin literature, as is borne out by the first few items of character exposition in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), the most well-known twin novel of the nineteenth century. Right from the beginning, Angelica is forced into a supplementary relationship with her twin Diavolo; even though the two of them do not amount to the antagonistic pairing which their two names would suggest, any aspect of difference serves to underline their status as complimentary signifiers, with Angelica being introduced as “the elder, taller, stronger, and wickeder of the two” (Grand 1893/1992, 7). It is my conviction that we must not limit this observation to twin literature alone, but that twin tales present us with problems pertaining to wider philosophical and methodological issues that will be discussed throughout this book. They include the search for individualism and identity, the attribution of guilt and responsibility in the face of genetic determinism, and serialised repetition and the alleged loss of aura. Beyond these major talking points, my analyses will also address the microstructure of rhetoric and stylistic devices, quite a few of which show a clear affinity towards twinship: puns, orthographic peculiarities, and grammatical discordance. In Robertson’s Ours, one character announces that “[t]he twins has got the twinsey” (82), which combines a word mix-up (quinsy/‘twinsey’) with a clash between plural noun and verb singular. Frequently, there is an abundance of stylistic twinned devices to be found in these texts; the madness of duality can neither be contained at the structural nor at the lexematic level, and few authors resist the temptation to throw in a joke or two along these lines. When the twin sisters in Evans’ 26a have a go at shoplifting, they steal Twix bars; dim-witted quadruplet Billy in the Cooney/Hilton farce One for the Pot (1963) constantly fails at putting two and two together; and in Little Miss Twins (1984), a volume in Roger Hargreaves’ popular Little Miss series for children, the reader is introduced to the country of “Twoland,” where everything exists in pairs, to the extent that even verbal utterances come with their own, inbuilt echoes (“Good morning morning”, “She’s my twin twin”, n.p.). Ultimately, twin literature bears testimony to the twinned condition of language itself, in that it highlights the latter’s fundamentally flawed nature, the signifier always on a futile chase to catch up with and unambiguously connote the signified. As though to flash a

Introducing Twins  13 utopian alternative in front of our eyes, twin narratives sometimes tease us with an approximation of how different things could be if we were able to tune into the secret language of twinship itself: their cryptophasia. For the Jones brothers in Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, it is simply “the language of the angels” (1982/1998, 40).

Choice of Material Each of the following chapters will discuss a number of texts that belong to the respective paradigm, but apart from a few asides here and there, I will limit myself to primary texts in which twins appear as part of the principal cast. There are hundreds of novels and plays which resort to what I call ‘incidental twin’ syndrome, particularly in the realm of children’s and young-adult fiction.5 These are truly farcical characters if we resort to that term’s original meaning: ‘filler’ material to complement the literary dish. In Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), Lewis Carroll provides the most iconic example of this kind of illustrative literary twinship in Tweedledum and Tweedledee, two nonsensical characters who are so static that Alice wonders whether they might be statues. They remain of uncertain parentage, of course, just like Dupont & Dupond, the two clumsy detectives who routinely provide comic relief in Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin, by dressing completely alike and frequently duplicating each other’s verbal utterances through an excess of synonyms and tautologies. The English translation turns them into ‘Thomson & Thompson,’ retaining the silent consonant that characterises the pair as personified différance and thus, paradoxically, suggests complete identity while at the same time negating their twinship, by virtue of the subtle difference in their surnames. Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, they are destined to remain tied to each other, sometimes literally so, as when Tintin handcuffs the two buffoons in L’île noire (The Black Island, 1938). Twin characters of this curious variety feature in some of the most popular canonical titles in literary history, and very often in children’s or young-adult fiction: the Otis twins in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost (1887), who are so unruly that they can even shatter a ghost’s nervous system; the unnamed twins amongst Peter Pan’s tribe of lost boys, who, according to the narrator in J.M. Barrie’s novelisation of his own play, “cannot be described because we should be sure to be describing the wrong one” (Barrie 1911/1949, 69); baby twins John and Barbara in P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, to whom Mary has to explain that they will soon lose their supernatural ability to converse with the sunlight and with animals (1934/1981, 140); or Fred and George Weasley in Joanne K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007), two tricksters who constantly play pranks on everyone, including their own mother.6 When she presents them with jumpers bearing their initials in Harry Potter and

14  Introducing Twins the Philosopher’s Stone, they temporarily conflate their identities and change their names to “Gred and Forge” (Rowling 1997/2000, 219). The bigger the fictional universe, the likelier it is to contain twins; this is as true of the Dickensian world as it is of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or of The Simpsons (1989–), which features several twin pairs amongst its dramatis personae, including Marge’s sisters, Patty and Selma, as well as Bart’s classmates, Sherri and Terri. In literature, ‘incidental twins’ are often the first to be omitted when the respective texts are adapted for the screen, unless their presence is considered gospel by the fans, as is the case in Harry Potter. Barrie’s narrative voice is not the only one to crack the self-referential joke that noone, not even a narrative instance with the privilege of omniscience, can really tell them apart. Of Jackson and Pierrot in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), the narrative voice reports that “one could only know them generally” (69). William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) draws the logical consequences and gradually syncopates twins Sam and Eric to “Sam ‘n Eric” (43) and eventually to “Samneric” (72). The examples taken from McEwan and Golding indicate that the phenomenon is not limited to children’s literature, and indeed, the latter will not feature very prominently throughout this book. I am not excluding it here because it is ‘only’ children’s literature, but because it tends to employ twinship as a gimmick. By the same token, there is no focus here on novelists who utilise twinship as a didactic tool, the way it is done in an anonymously published epistolary novel like The Twin Sisters; or, the Effects of Education (1792), which subjects one of its eponymous heroines to a city upbringing and the other one to the kind of training usually reserved for the male elite; a similar set-up is used in Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818), a proto-feminist novel of education. While twins appear in bigger roles here, their twinship remains incidental to the plot and is taken for a fact, as a mere vehicle to make a point about the force of bloodlines or to conduct a social experiment. This is also true of John Burnside’s The Dumb House (1997), a contemporary, Mengele-inspired spin on the mad monologist’s narrative in which twins are subjected first to a laboratory set-up of complete isolation and speechlessness and later to laryngotomies and infanticide. Some of these texts resemble ‘laboratory fictions’ along the lines of the classic twin experiment: “For clear-cut results, twins are orphaned early and farmed out” (Schwartz 1996, 29). This pattern was a favourite of twentieth-century behaviourists when it came to determining the relative importance of hereditary as opposed to environmental factors, and it was clearly taken to heart by a number of authors over the years, though the resulting texts are frequently rather light on nuanced psychology. My case studies will not limit themselves to laboratory fictions, though the pattern is arguably never far off. The analyses will rather take important chapters in the history of British

Introducing Twins  15 culture as their points of departure, but they will also draw lines across the historical continuum right into the immediate present by going back and forth and by citing additional examples from later periods as well as notable films that show similar signifying processes at work. This book will, for the most part, concentrate on literature, but twinship has clearly shown an affinity for audiovisual media throughout the twentieth century. Film has its own bag of tricks in order to lend twinship some degree of corporeality, and it revels in its paradoxical endeavour of being a mass medium while delivering warnings about cloning and the loss of aura. All of these topics are addressed throughout this book, as it would be short-sighted to ignore cinematic representations of twinship altogether. The individual case studies are preceded by a chapter on key aspects of twin scholarship and some of the most influential twin myths (conceiving twins), which will recur as master narratives throughout the subsequent chapters. The chapters themselves are diachronic cross-sections that illuminate some of the sense-making operations that have contributed to our understanding of twins, and they focus on the diverse ways in which twinship is understood, feared, ridiculed, and desired. The material was organised on the basis of a historical timeline that produces a number of major caesuras, all of which mark a renegotiation of the category of twinship in relation to other discursive fields, including those of gynaecology or criminology, and it is these four caesuras that feed into the structure of the case studies presented in Chapters 3–6. Each of them is organised around one central semantic pattern: confusion (which examines the role of twins in farcical comedies of mistaken identity), appropriation (which is dedicated to adaptation, plagiarism, and illegitimacy), detection (which traces twinship at the dawn of modern criminology and the early detective novel), and multiplication (which revolves around cloning fantasies of dystopian science-fiction novels and biopolitics). The final chapter will summarise the results and discuss the significance of twinship on a meta-literary level, asking whether the sense-making operations of textual production and reading are twinned procedures to begin with. I have tried to incorporate all of the major twin texts which British literary history has produced, but because the material was grouped around the four semantic operations and the predominant shifts of the respective time period, some quite noteworthy and prominent texts either had to be dropped from my investigation altogether or only appear on its fringes. This concerns, for example, Grand’s The Heavenly Twins; important as that novel may have been in the context of the New Woman debate and as a caesura in the history of feminist writing, it does not contribute a great deal to the literary evolution of the detective paradigm which I see as the dominant tendency in nineteenth-century treatments of literary twinship. My choice of material frequently points

16  Introducing Twins outside the established literary canon, partly because allegedly disreputable texts which proudly boast their genre labels often tend to be sidelined in discussions of literary twinship. A few additional remarks should be made with regard to scope: the focus will not be limited to monozygotic twins, even though they tend to fire the literary imagination more than twins of the non-identical variety. It should be obvious that identical twins provide more opportunity for mistaken identity, farcical confusion, and uncanny encounters, but all twin births constitute events out of the ordinary and have spawned strategies of naturalisation; these continue to apply in equal measure to fraternal as well as identical twins. Moreover, I will investigate different kinds of Anglophone literature, but am primarily concerned with British literature and culture, which is not to say that I am oblivious to what lies beyond the realm of Great Britain. While it makes sense to single in on the Elizabethan or the Victorian era as distinct breeding grounds for discursive paradigm shifts, it would be foolish to omit mythical pretexts that have informed the literary history of the twin motif, as well as noteworthy texts written in other languages: anyone who deliberately overlooks Tournier’s Gemini, for instance, would be ignoring one of the most complex literary contributions to the twin motif, and the same goes for other media. Twins have had their moments in British film history, but few of them could rival the impact of Hollywood productions like the aforementioned Schwarzenegger comedy or the Charlie Kaufmanscripted twin parable Adaptation (2002). While they are not of primary concern here, cinematic techniques have stepped up to the challenge of twin duality in interesting ways and without exorcising all discomfort, especially in the horror genre. Sisters (1973), the first of Brian De Palma’s many Hitchcock pastiches, uses split-screen technique during a lengthy suspense sequence to illustrate the film’s schizophrenic themes. Two strands thus play out in direct juxtaposition: on the left-hand side of the screen, Dr. Breton and Danielle attempt to clear up the blood-bath left behind by Danielle’s mad, murderous twin, while on the right-hand side, a reporter approaches the crime scene, police in tow. De Palma even throws in a brief shot of Danielle in front of the bathroom mirror, and the division going through her face underlines the psychoanalytic theme7 and foreshadows the film’s big, Psycho-inspired plot twist (Fig. 1.1). On a meta-cinematic level, this paradigmatic sequence suggests that duality as the condition of twinship per se is also the essential prerequisite of narrativity in film, and the split signals the crucial moment of disruption. With the outbreak of Danielle’s schizophrenia and the appearance of her ‘twin,’ violence enters the film and, crucially, the plot kicks in.8 Robert Mulligan’s psychological thriller The Other (1972) serves up a similar twist, but relies on a less obvious and rather paradoxical strategy of representation in order to do so. Crucially, it casts

Introducing Twins  17

Fig. 1.1  Split-screen technique as cinematic twinship (Sisters).

two actors to play twins Niles and Holland, but foregoes the privilege of prominently displaying its twin asset: the mise-en-scène never puts the two children in the same shot.9 Though it is not my aim to cover all cinematic strategies of twin representation, they cannot and shall not be completely discarded here, and I will return to some of them in the chapters on adaptation and the cloning debate. For the time being, let us simply assert that it would be too simplistic to assume that literature is riddled with ambiguities while film is not. Both film and literature have different means of creating ambiguity at their disposal, and the same goes for the different ways in which they come to terms with twinship. Following the theoretical chapter, my account of literary twinship will start with the Shakespearean era – not because it invented the twin (or rather, it was not the only era to do so), but because it is the first era in British literary history to provide a considerable corpus of twin texts and because it paved the way for a genre paradigm that has shown itself to be productive until the present day.

Notes 1 The Springer twins met as middle-aged men and discovered that they had wives and sons with identical names and regularly vacationed on the same beach (Wright 1997, 44). 2 There are estimates that 20% of all conceptions are, in fact, twin conceptions, and it has been suggested that as many as 78% of all twin pregnancies result in the birth of singletons (Farmer 1996, 332; Skjærvve/Stokke/ Røskaft 2009, 1134). 3 In Stephen King’s novel, the Grady sisters are not twins, but Stanley Kubrick cast twin sisters in his film version.

18  Introducing Twins 4 I am grateful to Marina Scharlaj for bringing this example to my attention. 5 There are various comprehensive bibliographies and anthologies which provide an overview (see Storey 1993; Farmer 1996; Kröhnke/Kröhnke 1999). 6 There is plenty of erotic slash fiction surrounding the Weasley brothers and Rowling’s other twin pair, Padma and Parvati Patil. Arguably, “the Harry Potter franchise is singular in that two sets of identical twin pairs of different genders appear in the same fictional universe” (Cuntz-Leng 2014). 7 As though to drive home the point, the remake of Sisters (2006) turns the character of psychiatrist Dr. Breton into ‘Dr. Lacan.’ 8 See Pascal Bonitzer’s stellar account of how suspense and the motif of death enter the realm of the cinematic together with montage (1997). 9 Ich seh, ich seh (Goodnight Mommy, 2014) is another addition to this particular subgenre of twin horror, in which the late sibling exists as a hallucination of the surviving twin.

Works Cited Primary Texts A Lady (1792). The Twin Sisters; or, the Effects of Education. Dublin: Colbert. Barrie, J.M. (1911/1949). Peter Pan. New York: Scribner. Burnside, John (1997/2015). The Dumb House. London: Vintage. Carroll, Lewis (1872/1875). Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. New York: Macmillan. Chatwin, Bruce (1982/1998). On the Black Hill. London: Vintage. du Maurier, Daphne (1971/2010). ‘Don’t Look Now’ and Other Stories. London: Penguin. Evans, Diana (2005). 26a. London: Vintage. Ferrier, Susan (1818). Marriage. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Golding, William (1954/1983). Lord of the Flies. New York: Coward-McCann. Grand, Sarah (1893/1992). The Heavenly Twins. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm (1812/1975). The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hargreaves, Roger (1984). Little Miss Twins. London: Egmont. Hergé. The Black Island (1938/1975). Trans. Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. New York: Little, Brown & Co. Konar, Affinity (2016). Mischling. London: Atlantic. McEwan, Ian (2001). Atonement. London: Vintage. Nabokov, Vladimir (1965). Despair. New York: G.P. Putnam. Plato (2008). The Symposium. Trans. Margaret C. Howatson. Cambridge: CUP. Robertson, T.W. (1866/1980). “Ours.” Six Plays. Ashover: Amber Lane, 57–116. Rowling, Joanne K. (1997/2000). Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. Setterfield, Diane (2006). The Thirteenth Tale. New York: Washington Square. Tournier, Michel (1975/1998). Gemini. Trans. Anne Carter. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP. Travers, P.L. (1934/1981). Mary Poppins. New York: Harcourt. Tremayne, S.K. (2015). The Ice Twins. London: Harper. Wilde, Oscar (1887/2016). ‘The Canterville Ghost’ and Other Stories. Richmond: Alma.

Introducing Twins  19 Other Media “Cane and Able” (2006). S3E2 of House, M.D. Cr. David Shore. NBC Universal. “Grief Counseling” (2006). S3E14 of The Office. Cr. Greg Daniels. NBC Universal. Ich seh, ich seh (2014). Dir. Veronika Franz/Severin Fiala. Dimension Films. Sisters (1973). Dir. Brian De Palma. Orion. “The First Chang Dynasty” (2012). S3E21 of Community. Cr. Dan Harmon. NBC. The Other (1972). Dir. Robert Mulligan. Fox. “Tolmachevy Sisters: Shine (Russia)” (2014). YouTube, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=f7HKBlAzN5I.

Secondary Texts Baudrillard, Jean (1990). “The ‘Ludic’ and Cold Seduction.” Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s P, 157–178. Baudrillard, Jean (1997/2002). “The Clone or the Degree Xerox of the Species.” Screened Out. Trans. Chris Turner. London/New York: Verso, 196–202. Beck, Julie (2016). “Why Mothers in Rich Countries Are Having More Twins.” The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/why-mothers-inrich-countries-are-having-more-twins/462069/. Bergson, Henri (1900/1994). “Laughter.” Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 61–190. Bonitzer, Pascal (1997). “Hitchcockian Suspense.” Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London/New York: Verso, 15–30. Campbell, D.M. (1998). “Epidemiology of Twinning.” Current Obstetrics and Gynaecology 8.3: 126–134. Chan, Melissa (2016). “Man Confesses to Murder That His Identical Twin Brother Was Convicted of a Decade Ago.” Time, http://time.com/4506035/ twin-brother-confesses-murder-illinois/. Cohen, Michael (1995). Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-Century British Novels and Paintings. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP. Cuntz-Leng, Vera (2014). “Twinship, Incest, and Twincest in the Harry Potter Universe.” Transformative Works and Cultures 17, http://journal.­ transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/576/457. de Nooy, Juliana (2005). Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Charles Stivale and Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP. Farmer, Penelope (1996). Two, or: The Book of Twins and Doubles. London: Virago. Freud, Sigmund (1919/2003). The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin. Frey, Barbara (2006). Zwillinge und Zwillingsmythen in der Literatur. Frankfurt/London: IKO. Hahn, Werner (1998). Symmetry as a Developmental Principle in Nature and Art. Singapore: World Scientific.

20  Introducing Twins Hallam, Clifford (1981). “The Double as Incomplete Self: Toward a Definition of Doppelgänger.” Fearful Symmetry: Doubles and Doubling in Literature and Film. Ed. Eugene Crook. Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 1–31. Hartland, E. Sidney (1921). “Twins.” Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Vol. XII. Eds. James Hastings, John A. Selbie, and Louis H. Gray. Edinburgh: Clark, 491–500. Herdman, John (1990). The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hope, Hannah, and Emmeline Saunders (2017). “Will Young Opens up about Porn Addiction and How He Went to a Shaman to Cure Himself.” Mirror, www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/will-young-porn-addiction-cure10509438. Kröhnke, Karl, and Friedrich Kröhnke, eds. (1999). Zwillinge. Frankfurt/ Leipzig: Insel. Lash, John (1993). Twins and the Double. London: Thames & Hudson. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1995). The Story of Lynx. Trans. Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Miller, Sara G. (2015). “US Twin Birthrate Hits All-Time High.” Live Science, www.livescience.com/53181-twin-birth-rate-hits-record-high.html. Schoeller, Martin (2012). Identical: Portraits of Twins. Kempen: teNeues. Schwartz, Hillel (1996). The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books. Segal, Nancy L. (2012). Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Skjærvve, Gine Roll, Bård G. Stokke, and Eivin Røskaft (2009). “The Rarity of Twins: A Result of an Evolutionary Battle between Mothers and Daughters – or Do They Agree?” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 63.8: 1133–1140. Stewart, Elizabeth (2003). Exploring Twins: Towards a Social Analysis of Twinship. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Storey, Dee (1993). Twins in Children’s and Adolescent Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen: Scarecrow. Watson, Peter (1982). Twins: An Uncanny Relationship? New York: Viking. Waugh, Rob (2015). “Man Claims He ‘Accidentally’ Had Sex with His Wife’s Identical Twin Sister.” Metro, http://metro.co.uk/2015/05/19/man-claims-heaccidentally-had-sex-with-his-wifes-identical-twin-sister-5205705/. Wright, Lawrence (1997). Twins and What They Tell Us about Who We Are. New York: Wiley & Sons. Žižek, Slavoj (2000). “Of Cells and Slaves.” The Žižek Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 302–320.

2 Conceiving Twins

It is not possible to discuss twinship without taking note of the battles that continue to be fought between behaviourists and geneticists. In this chapter, I will outline how twins are invoked by both camps, and I will also briefly sketch the mythological pre-history of the twin motif that continues to inform modern twin literature, as it is by no means the exclusive prerogative of magical realist narratives to refer back to this intertextual archive. Twins frequently occupy a mediator role between the realms of animality, humanity, and the divine (Stewart 2003, 16), and we need not pledge exclusive allegiance to the camp of ‘naturalists’ to acknowledge that the existence of twins shows us how much we have in common with the animal kingdom, where ‘litter births’ are the rule rather than the exception. At the same time, pure biology seems an inadequate way of rationalising and naturalising this animalistic subtext, even though the two fields should form natural allies. After all, twin studies in the modern sense of the word were formed at about the same time as Charles Darwin put forward his revolutionary claims regarding the evolution of species – the publication of The Descent of Man (1871) precedes that of The History of Twins (1875), written by Darwin’s own relative Francis Galton, by a mere four years. It is the aim of this chapter to characterise the complicated history of twin scholarship in order to properly contextualise the field, starting with the eugenicist baggage that continues to haunt twin studies to this day.

National-Socialist Eugenics Browsing through the pages of more recent contributions to twin scholarship, one is likely to catch one or the other twin scholar off-guard, for instance, when – with a slight yet audible sigh – behaviourists voice their regret over how the calamities of twentieth-century eugenics have sealed off some scientific roads forever. While twin studies continue to testify in the nature/nurture debate, they are, overall, not as devoted to unabashed biological materialism as they used to be when eugenicists argued feverishly for the omnipotence of genetic disposition and heritability

22  Conceiving Twins (Boisvert/Vaske 2011, 162). These days, scholars employing twin studies are understandably careful to address the method’s historical baggage and the premises it was built on. While some of the results gathered from twin scholarship throughout the first half of the twentieth century may hold up,1 their ideological foundations have rightfully ended up on the rubbish heap of historical pseudo-science. In his influential study of twin pathology, German dermatologist Hermann Werner Siemens observes that it is quite a pity that human beings, unlike plants or some animals, cannot be subjected to hereditary experiments, as it is so hard “to obtain material” (Siemens 1924, 1, my translation). Lines like these would come back to haunt Siemens after the war, throwing immense doubt on his political and scientific credentials, 2 since the Nazis’ routine invocation of Menschenmaterial (‘human material’) quite unambiguously summed up their anti-human ideology. Careful as we are to maintain a distance between ourselves and the spectre of the camps, twin scholarship continues to put us into an uneasy alliance with these historical antecedents and with the unprecedented collective betrayal of the Hippocratic Oath. Following Galton’s work on heritability and his considerable efforts to promote twin scholarship as a methodological tool, scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gradually warmed to his approach, especially in Germany, where twin scholarship was routinely invoked to serve a biopolitical agenda. Reinhold Lotze, in a 1937 book on the twin method, enthusiastically proclaims that twins illustrate the power of heredity, and he is careful to single out the contribution of Galton, whom he not only praises as “one of the greatest minds of the past century,” but also, somewhat erroneously, as the founding father of modern race hygiene (54, my translation). Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, the Third Reich’s doyen of eugenics, performed a similar gesture of humility when he delivered a lecture to the Royal Society in June 1939, three months before Great Britain’s declaration of war on Germany cut all the existing ties of international scientific exchange (Verschuer 1939, 62–63). In the years leading up to the war, the world stood in awe of the prestige and the institutional and financial support that twin studies enjoyed in Germany, and when an international demographics conference was hosted in Berlin in 1935, Verschuer’s superior, Eugen Fischer, addressed the topics of genetic biology and race hygiene in front of an international audience, a few weeks before the Nuremberg Laws were passed (Schmuhl 2008, 209–210). The Germans were not the only ones to follow up on Galton’s pioneering work during the first decades of the twentieth century. State-funded eugenics institutes gradually established themselves in a number of other countries, and twin conventions and twin associations became en vogue across the globe, particularly in the United States. Like their German colleagues, the Americans were eager to identify twins as “the key to the solution of the relative roles of heredity and environment” (Rife 1941,

Conceiving Twins  23 154). Medical journals on both sides of the Atlantic eagerly published the results of twin studies, and as long as the diplomatic relationships had not been officially severed, each party gave the other one credit where it was due. In his London lecture, Verschuer thanked his American colleague, Horatio H. Newman, for his efforts (1939, 79), while Newman, in turn, spoke reverently of Siemens and praised Verschuer as one “of the most distinguished of European students of twins” (Newman/Freeman/ Holzinger 1937, 34; Newman 1941, 106). Prevalent as the study of twins may have been throughout the 1930s, nowhere was scientific interest in them more pronounced than in Germany, where a particular brand of biopolitics eventually turned state doctrine and contributed to the foundations of “the first radically biopolitical state” (Agamben 1995/1998, 143). Much of this work was done at the ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics’ (KWI), which was first headed by Fischer and later by his former protégé, Verschuer. The KWI, founded in 1927, profited from the momentum the race hygiene movement had gathered in the years after World War I. The Institute gradually turned into a German object of prestige (Schmuhl 2008, 37–39), and Fischer and Verschuer managed to promote interdisciplinary research, as is testified by their regular trips to international conferences or the big Rockefeller grant they received in 1930. Their main talent, however, was in “selling science as a national resource,” particularly once the Nazis had come to power (Adams/Allen/Weiss 2005, 244). Quickly, the KWI fully subscribed to National Socialism, contributing the pseudo-scientific foundation to the Nuremberg Laws and regularly providing racial testimonials.3 Between 1934 and 1942, members of the KWI published 182 papers and books on topics as diverse as the heritability of anti-bodies, sexual maturity, and dermatoglyphics, about a third of which drew upon twin data (Schmuhl 2008, 199). This work would pave the way for Mengele’s twin experiments in the camps. The detailed twin register set up by Verschuer and Fischer in the area of Greater Berlin routinely included observations on intelligence, character disposition, moral attitudes, and diseases. Once Verschuer had been appointed director of the newly founded Polyclinic for the Fostering of Genes and Race in 1934, research into genetic pathology became a priority, with sick twins repeatedly being singled out for research and receiving privileged treatment. The fanaticism exhibited by these large-scale concentrated efforts is one aspect in which the German approach to twin studies differed from that of other nations, and Verschuer’s ideologically tinged devotion to the school of heredity is another. What had begun to isolate him from his international colleagues during the 1930s was his ongoing crusade to prove that tuberculosis was not purely caused by environmental factors, but that one’s genetic disposition made it more likely to catch the disease (see ibid. 186–190). It is but one example of Verschuer’s strong conviction “that we must place

24  Conceiving Twins far more importance on hereditary disposition than we have done so far” (Verschuer 1933, 369, my translation). Although eugenicists in the rest of the world did not, on the whole, believe it was hereditary components alone that caused diseases such as diabetes and rickets, all of which Verschuer involved in his argument, much of the KWI’s work was still accepted in the scientific community, particularly amongst those who strongly identified with Galton’s seminal work and his central tenet that “the environment [is not] able to create anything which is not potentially present in the genotype” (Fortuyn 1932, 299). From here, it was but a small step towards mental illness and neural diseases and towards delivering experimental ‘proof’ of Siemens’ earlier hypothesis that heredity was key in establishing mental faculties. Some minor differentiations aside, Verschuer and his followers argued unreservedly for the impact that hereditary influences had on a person’s inclination towards mental disease and lawlessness. This brought them in close alignment to the wide-spread discourse on degeneration and a line of argument popularised in Germany by Johannes Lange, whose influential book, Verbrechen als Schicksal (Crime as Destiny), recommends “measures concerning sexual hygiene” so that “criminal nature” might be erased from breeding (Lange 1929, 96, my translation). This is fully in line with the mechanisms of bodily discipline and population control that Michel Foucault outlines in his initial formulation of biopolitics: sexuality, as a corporeal mode of behaviour, is put under surveillance, with medicine invoked as “power-knowledge” that eventually comes to intervene (Foucault 2004, 252). By building upon Lange’s work and formulating their complete support for measures of sterilisation, particularly when it came to ‘feeble-minded’ criminals, alcoholics, and psychopaths, NS eugenicists paved the way towards the concentration camps. None of them featured more prominently in this context than Josef Mengele, who had completed a Ph.D. thesis on racial differences in birth defects under Verschuer’s supervision (Lifton 1986, 339). It was with Mengele’s work in the camps that all the final remnants of medical ethics in studying twins went completely overboard. Following a two-year stint in the military, Mengele reunited with his Ph.D. supervisor Verschuer in 1943 and transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he routinely subjected inmates to cruel experiments, including artificial injection with various diseases and enforced sterilisation. He also presented his former doctoral adviser with ‘gifts’ such as blood-samples or the eyes of murdered Jews, Sinti, or Roma. Yet not only would Verschuer subsequently insist that he was a humanist who strongly objected to torture and cruel experiments, he extended the claim to Mengele himself who, Verschuer suggested, must have been forced to work in the camps against his will (Lifton 1986, 341). There clearly is yet another process of twinning at work here, one that is associated with the whitewashing mentality that so many former Nazis exhibited after the war. Robert

Conceiving Twins  25 Jay Lifton talks about the Faustian process whereby the surviving Nazi doctors whom he interviewed decades after the war established their ­Janus-faced “Auschwitz Self,” dividing themselves “into two functioning wholes” to save face (ibid. 418). In Verschuer’s case, a racially biased biological materialist reinvented himself as a religious humanist and, in retrospect, aligned himself with those scientists who had only participated in the NS machinery in order to protect potential victims (Verschuer 1966, 14). His newly found beliefs in traditional family values made Verschuer ideally suited for a stellar career in post-war Adenauer Germany (Weiss 2010, 751–753).4 Not that he completely revised his scholarly profile: while he would dial back on his fanatic claims regarding the evolutionary prospects of the genetically ‘unfit,’ he continued to voice his belief that genetic disposition trumped environmental factors when it came to character and intelligence (see Verschuer 1954, 150–159), and his 1966 introduction to eugenics contains an emphatic appeal to the intellectual elite to reproduce amongst themselves in order to contribute something to the cultural grandeur of the following generations (Verschuer 1966, 81). At this point, the resurgence of eugenics was underway not only in Germany, as is illustrated in Joe Orton’s black comedy What the Butler Saw (1969), which premiered the same year that Verschuer passed away. In the play, cold-blooded eugenic attitudes are the prerogative of utterly inhumane, corrupt authorities like Dr. Prentiss, who characterises his own wife, a mother of twins, as “an example of in-breeding among the lobelia-growing classes” and as a “failure in eugenics,” whose alcoholism and nymphomania make it “most undesirable for her to become a mother” (Orton 1969/1994, 371). Prentiss’s insensitive parroting of Nazi rhetoric resonates with Orton’s overall countercultural disdain for the establishment, but this does not mean that eugenics was completely on its way out. In fact, twinship remained of undiminished importance, and twins continue to be invoked as key witnesses to testify in the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, called upon both by hereditists and behaviourists to support their claims.

The Nature/Nurture Debate Modern twin scholarship rests on the seminal work of Galton, E.L. Thorndike’s establishment of I.Q. tests, the post-war rise of behaviourism, and the gradual reconciliation between the two camps. It is an incredibly nuanced and rich history, in spite of the various drawbacks that did damage to its reputation – not just the cruel experiments conducted by Nazi scientists, but also a case like that of the English psychologist Cyril Burt. In order to support his claims about the heritability of intelligence, Burt had regularly manipulated his experimental findings and invented co-authors and collaborators, thus performing his own distinct brand of

26  Conceiving Twins imposturous twinship (see Joseph 2015, 46–48). Moreover, the Nazis were far from alone in their absolute belief that heredity was everything and the environment counted for nothing. Long before twin scholarship became popular, many other scientists had followed Galton’s example. Thorndike invoked heredity as “the chief determining factor” to explain the differences in intelligence between the races (Thorndike 1905, 553), and in 1937, a Chicago-based study concluded “that IQ is largely inherited” (Watson 1982, 74). Where twin studies were rejected, this usually happened because of ideological rather than ethical qualms. As twin studies were seen to be in contradiction with Marxist ideology, which assumes that “people are inherently the same and that differences are imposed upon them by their environment”, Communist Russia closed its own leading research facility, before re-opening it in the 1960s (Wright 1997, 15). In many countries, the scientific community quickly reconciled itself to the idea of twin studies after World War II. Such was the popularity of the heredity argument that one can observe a large degree of continuity between twin scholarship of the first and the second half of the twentieth century, even though the discipline’s reputation had suffered. Reading twin research from the 1960s and even from the 1970s today, one is struck by how few qualms the scientific community had about not only continuing twin research but also about using the results produced throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In his seminal book on twins, Luigi Gedda cites many of Verschuer’s findings and writes about German twin research without once mentioning what harm this kind of research did (see Gedda 1961, 155–214); Peter Mittler, writing in 1971, cites figures from the 1930s and 1940s to support the alleged intellectual inferiority of twins. At the same time, scholars voicing their distinct preference for genetic models of explanation during this time could not completely gloss over the fact of how out of sync with current thinking their approach was; Mittler’s disdain for the behaviourist model is clear when he states his conviction that genes account for most of the differences in intelligence, even though “such a conclusion may be unacceptable at a time when ‘fashions’ in psychology and education emphasize the role of environment in the development of intelligence” (1971, 95). It is not my aim to settle this debate or to claim an exclusive allegiance to either side, but to show how twins have played a key role as “living laboratories” (Segal 1999, 1) in what has maybe been the singularly fiercest battle raging in modern science. As identical twins embody, in Michel Tournier’s phrase, “both heredity and environment” (1975/1998, 414), scientists have frequently subjected them to experiments in order to prove “that, given the identical genetic fabric of the two individuals, similarities between them may be explored for hereditary factors while differences may be linked to environment” (Farber 1981, 5).

Conceiving Twins  27 Paradoxically, what we call twin research often reveals very little about twins themselves, but merely exploits their genetic similarities so as to draw on a reliable sample while interrogating other phenomena, which effectively makes them “the workhorse of behavior genetics” (Alford/ Hibbing 2008, 193). The basic proposition has remained the same: knowing that monozygotic twins “derive from a single fertilized egg and therefore inherit identical genetic material” allows researchers to compare their resemblance “for a trait or disease with the resemblance of [dizygotic] twins” in order to estimate “the extent to which genetic variation determines phenotypic variation of that trait” (Boomsma/Busjahn/ Peltonen 2002, 873). Overall, scientists have grown more sensitive to the possible methodological pitfalls in these scenarios. It took some time for them to get around to the idea that there is variation in DNA (­Charney 2011, 127–129), and that identical twins are frequently subjected to identical treatment by their parents, so that what looks like ‘natural’ difference or similarity may well be the product of unperceived environmental factors and parental influence. There are many more complaints against the dominant twin method, including the notorious neglect of environmental factors in the upbringing of twins (Horwitz et al. 2003, 113–114). Thus, scientists working with the twin method had to ponder whether their experimental set-ups were inherently biased, whether it was fair to assume that monozygotic twins start out in life with the same genetic set-up in spite of ‘environmental differences’ in their prenatal habitat, and how the tendency of twins to assume complementary roles could influence any assessment of sameness and difference. As Susan Farber argues, there is no such thing as a trait that comes “independent of hereditary or environmental agents,” for the genetic potential becomes expressed only within certain environmental conditions, and our genetic set-up also influences how we process our environment (1981, 5). To put it more prosaically, the tendency of twins to dress alike need not be innate, or as identical twin Richard Waghorn puts it in a conversation with The Guardian: “It’s not telepathy, just identical taste in jumpers” (qtd. in Pook 2016). One relatively recent attempt to compensate for some of these methodological shortcomings inherent in many twin data samples has been the turn towards studying twins who were reared apart, as they do not develop by way of negating or affirming each other – shared genes but no shared environment. Twin scholars thus sense an opportunity to study the ‘material’ without the inevitable psychological baggage. Following the first study of identical twins reared apart in 1922, scientists gradually embraced this set-up as the more favourable model, though it took a while for a sufficient amount of data to be gathered. A major breakthrough arrived with the ground-breaking Minnesota study and its much-publicised cases like the two Jims, stories which “have been told and retold by both researchers and journalists ad nauseam” and which show off such considerable marketing skills that

28  Conceiving Twins observers have begun to doubt their scientific worth (Joseph 2015, 53– 54). Not that the Minnesota model is free of methodological pitfalls: its data may be just as biased, seeing as the study tends to prioritise twins who are physically similar – similarity being a key determining factor in the twins, finding out that they are twins to begin with – and that they often come from broken homes, which does not allow for the sample to be generalised (Watson 1982, 20). For these reasons, it does not suffice to conclude that “all differences between MZ twins must be due to the effects of their environment, whereas the differences between DZs can be due either to environment or to their genes” (ibid. 18), and indeed, it is very rare to come across hardcore naturists working in the field today. Key findings remain controversial, especially where the field of intelligence is concerned (see Segal 2017, 143–161), yet these days, the formerly irreconcilable camps tend to co-operate, looking for joint explanations and leaving the fiercest battles of the ‘either/or’ variety behind them. This has not stopped either camp from attempting to discredit the other from time to time, as is evidenced by Brian Palmer’s polemic piece on twin studies published in Slate (2011) and Nancy L. Segal’s response to it (2011). Most authorities now acknowledge that a trait is rarely “purely genetic or only a product of a person’s environment” (Nordrum 2014), and they certainly do not run out of data. Twin births have been steadily increasing in the Western world, and in 2015, about 1.5 million participants were registered in more than 70 twin registries worldwide (Joseph 2015, 3). Scientists regularly attend Twins Day, where they can gather “a year’s worth of data in three days,” according to psychologist Paul Breslin (qtd. in Nordrum 2014). But twin scholarship has never limited itself to research on its doorstep, as its long shared history with ethnography demonstrates.

Ethnographic Findings Ethnographers have frequently observed and commented on twin cults, particularly in West Africa and South America. As in other scientific fields, the twin is thus employed as a kind of probe to assess the degree of ‘Otherness’ and to reveal the other culture’s value systems and beliefs. Similar practices abound in literary texts like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), a key text in postcolonial literature. The book outlines twin rituals to illustrate differences between Africans and the English missionaries working in Africa, “rescuing twins from the bush” and “welcom[ing] twins and such abominations” which the villagers, in the era before the missionaries, had “immediately thrown away” (Achebe 1958/1998, 107–111).5 Needless to say, some of the classic ethnographic accounts make for uncomfortable reading today, particularly where they employ an unabashedly colonialist gaze to observe how these allegedly ‘primitive’ people deal with twins. In her book Travels in West Africa,

Conceiving Twins  29 Mary Kingsley simply states: “I distrust those Bantus in the matter of twins” (1897/2003, 472). Here, too, World War II only signified a very minor caesura; ethnographic observations of twin practices were very popular and widely received in other disciplines, with many scholars replicating findings gathered by pioneers in the field. In France, René Zazzo drew on ethnographic research to substantiate his psychological profile of the twin, published in his ground-breaking book, Les Jumeaux (1960), and his work was lapped up by novelists like Michel Tournier or Bruce Chatwin. The most prominent ethnographers reporting on twins certainly are Claude Lévi-Strauss and Victor Turner. Although both refrain from generalisations regarding the tribes they encountered, the overwhelming tendency has been to highlight the more gruesome and sensational details amongst their findings. Lévi-Strauss goes so far as to claim that most South-American peoples fear “a sort of sacred horror for twins” (1995, 62), a fear that becomes manifest in extreme measures which have been reported from various corners of the earth. Sometimes the mother was banished from the village together with her offspring, leading to the establishment of special ‘twin towns’; other tribes reportedly underwent purification rites following the birth of twins. The most extreme measure was ­infanticide – a practice that has been reported from areas as diverse as West Africa, Southern Africa, North America, Australia, and Japan. No doubt there is a strong tendency for demonisation at work here, with many of the accounts smacking of the era of colonialist exploration and exploitation, and of sensationalist narratives about primitive savages. Ethnographers who show a deeper investment with the observed culture, as well as scientists sensitive towards tendencies of ‘Othering’ who work with these reports manage to rationalise some of this by investigating the underlying social frameworks of taboo, and they suggest that these practices, in essence, betray cultural anxieties that are just as common in allegedly more ‘advanced’ societies. This clearly applies to the fear of female adultery, which is linked to a number of sensitive issues: superfetation, the fear that twins may not be fit for survival, that they might endanger their mother’s life, or the fact that twin births mean a considerable hardship for poor families in particular: Good twins are born of the rich, who can spend as much as necessary to neutralize the dangers inherent to this kind of birth and to draw, at a later date, enormous benefits from them. The poor do not have this option; thus twins born of a poor family are a curse not only for the family but for the whole of society. (Lévi-Strauss 1995, 124) Moreover, twins may present a threat to the social structure of the community: “if two people of similar age were accepted into the society

30  Conceiving Twins where the principle of seniority was of great importance”, kinship troubles could well ensue (Oruene 1985, 209): particularly in royal families, whose matrilineage then faced “problems of succession, inheritance, and precedence” (Turner 1969/1995, 46). That the very same fears apply just as much to the imagination of Western Europe is testified by many literary texts that the subsequent chapters will deal with. The rather matter-of-fact economic fears that come with enlarged families are at home in Yoruba society just as much as in European folk-tales. It is not a coincidence that the only two stories in Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812) to revolve around twinship concern poor families: that of the broom-maker in Die zwei Brüder (The Two Brothers) and that of the fisherman in Die Goldkinder (The Gold-Children). Benign beliefs regarding twins have been reported far less frequently, though this may reveal more about the media environment and the implied target audience than it does about the cultures in question. According to ethnographic reports, twins signified a good omen to Native American tribes like the Mohave, the Navajo, the Lummi, and the Squamish, who viewed them as having beneficial effects on hunting and the weather. Meanwhile, the Yoruba came to reinterpret twins not as a curse, but as a blessing, and they began to embrace the idea that a double-birth meant there was a higher chance for at least one baby to survive infancy (Oruene 1985, 209; Korinthenberg 2008, 13–14). Though the dominant tone of twin narratives may change in tribal societies, ambiguities and subliminal anxieties remain part of the folklore; they also continue to find their way into transcultural literature that engages with the topic of migration. Twinship has thus remained a common trope in Black British novels such as Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde (1994), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), and Diana Evans’ 26a (2005), all of which investigate dual and plural identities (see Brancato 2009, 89–95; Vogt-William 2015). Emecheta’s Kehinde establishes the protagonist’s vanished twin, her ‘Taiwo,’ as a confidante with whom she shares “vaguely-­acknowledged fears” regarding her husband’s infidelity (1994, 146), but also as a haunting presence testing her allegiance to the family and her home country.6 Evans, on the other hand, works African myths and elements of magical realism into her account of an Anglo-Nigerian family. On a visit to their mother’s home country, twins Georgia and Bessi learn about the debated status of twinship in Nigerian folk beliefs, and they are equally fascinated by the mythological tale of one twin’s spirit entering her sister’s body. Following an experience of sexual abuse, Georgia gradually withdraws from her family and eventually has a vision of the mythological twins trying to lure her to the other side, which triggers her suicide and Bessi’s absorption of Georgia’s spirit. The author invokes the mythological realm of the bush as a Third Space of in-betweenness that allows the survivor to work through her grief and to finally let go of her

Conceiving Twins  31 sister (Brancato 2009, 90–92). The transcendental coda is quite typical, as twin narratives frequently drop psychology in favour of metaphysics and allow their protagonists “to re-enter the elemental and the cosmic” (Gascoigne 1996, 195). The alleged magical powers of twins open up the realm of shared beliefs and superstitions, many of which also become manifest in the collectively memorised myths of Western Europe, a rich archive of beliefs that contemporary literature continues to draw upon. Again, the list is endless: it includes “powers of fortune, healing, fertility, tracking down thieves, avenging wrongs” (Oruene 1985, 213), twins’ special relationship with fish and moisture, or their divine powers which are sometimes said to extend even to their non-twin siblings and which give them an almost sacred status. Some tribes, like the Guyaki Indians in Paraguay, allegedly go so far as to view twins not as monstrous anomalies, but as the norm, which means that singletons are, to them, but incomplete children (Frey 2006, 15–16). Another inversion of dominant views regarding twinship concerns the birth-order. Usually, the first-born twin is seen as the elder of the two, but there have been ethnographic reports to the contrary in other parts of the world. Amongst the Yoruba, the firstborn twin is usually regarded the junior, “sent ahead of the senior to see what the world is like – in the Yoruba system, only seniors send juniors on errands” (Oruene 1985, 211).

The Mythological Archive If it is true that our collective unconscious betrays an underlying, shared discomfort when it comes to twins, then it is not much of a surprise that this should become manifest in myths. As a “system of communication” that gives things “a natural and eternal justification,” myth, while not natural, adds a touch of the transcendentally pure to stories that, by virtue of being constantly retold, appear incapable of change and are thus flexible enough to accommodate the most wildly contradictory notions (Barthes 1957/2009, 131). As a consequence, myth is capable of portraying twins simultaneously “as positive and negative, harmonious and rivalrous, happy and unhappy, divine and human” (Stewart 2003, 11). We continue to invoke these ur-texts to make sense of our twin neurosis, in a manner akin to Joseph Campbell’s well-known dictum that “[d]ream is the personalized myth, [and] myth the depersonalized dream” (1949/2008, 14). This may be one way of explaining why the collective imagination continues to give birth to these troubled conceptions. As with the ethnographic reports about twin cults, it is easy to recognise in these ancient stories parallels to contemporary discussions which are, in fact, only footnotes to debates that have been raging for centuries. The same goes for cultural anxieties – just consider the discourse surrounding medical control over the female body, and the patriarchal fear

32  Conceiving Twins of unfaithful women, of cuckoldry, and of genealogical illegitimacy that frequently becomes manifest in paternal doubt surrounding the genesis of twins, and compare this discourse to the various myths that attempt to explain the existence of twins by way of the supernatural. This is the realm of horny divinities who adopt human shape in order to ravish unsuspecting wives, who in turn give birth to powerful demigods. Consider the catastrophic resolution that so many tales about rivalrous twin brothers are bound for, and then think of the suppressed guilt that befalls those who suffer from ‘vanishing twin’ syndrome (Schwartz 1996, 27). Or look at the zodiacal symbolism of the sign of Gemini: its connection to the moment in the cosmic phase when “pure creative force (Aries and Taurus) is severed into two parts” (Cirlot 1990, 116) emulates the biological process that science only caught up with centuries after the myth had come into being. Lévi-Strauss points to some local differences in the treatment of the twin motif, yet these are not absolute and tend rather to be matters of mirroring and inversion. The shared mythological ancestry exceeds parallels that a common Indo-European source could account for, such as those between the Greek Dioscuri and the Hindu Aśvins. Most cultures manage to accommodate quite contradictory twin myths and to utilise them as symbols of complementarity and harmony, of antagonism and rivalry, and of complementary relationships, be it that between the sexes, as in Plato, or that between immanence and transcendence (Schmitz-Emans 2012, 502–503). I do not aim to explore all the various twin tropes that exist within the Greco-Roman tradition as well as outside it, but a brief overview of some of the most pervasive ones will prove fruitful in order to properly contextualise more recent iterations of the twin motif in English literature, many of which come with their own mythological baggage. It is impossible to untangle these myths completely, for they tend to overlap quite frequently, and it is common for twin narratives like the one about the rivalrous brothers to align themselves with several other traditions at the same time. Tempting as it may be to try and classify in concise form distinct motifs like ‘the evil twin,’ ‘the trickster twin,’ ‘the uncanny twin,’ or ‘the forlorn twin,’ I want rather to outline three major tropes that feed into the literary history of twinship as mythological pre-texts. As the following chapters will show, these are regularly semantisised and/or married to genres in quite different ways. The fraternal struggle, for instance, is at the heart of both horrific doppelganger stories and comedies of mistaken identity; by the same token, the idea of preternatural involvement in the breeding of twins has been known to spark uncanny horror fiction as well as comedies of incongruity, like Ivan Reitman’s Twins (1988), which pairs Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of a Herculean Übermensch artificially produced from perfect DNA samples with Danny DeVito as the former’s deficient twin brother, cloned from the leftovers. The aim of this chapter is thus to provide the

Conceiving Twins  33 backdrop against which to assess subsequent chapters of literary history, which marry mythical pre-texts to predominant cultural anxieties of their time to produce twinned offspring with diverse agendas and in diverse generic forms. Divine Origins One shared motif that appears across several mythologies is that of the divine origins of twins. Ekkehard Stärk estimates that the heroes and gods who feature prominently in ancient myths give birth to twins about five times as frequently as common people (Stärk 1989, 147), which is not to say that Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Mahābhārata are brimming with farcical tales of mistaken identity. Quite the contrary, mythological twins seldom run the risk of being confused for one another, as they frequently stem from superfetation: a woman becomes pregnant with two children from two different acts of intercourse, and in the mythological spin on this scientifically possible, though extremely rare scenario, one of the twins is usually “seen as an intervention of the supernatural into the natural world” (Lash 1993, 82). Zeus allegedly fathered three different pairs of twins, and Poseidon five; in most of the cases, the divinity interferes with a married couple and ends up fathering only one of the twins, the other one being the child of the woman’s mortal husband. These origin tales, which include the pairings of Castor/Pollux and Hercules/Iphicles, are at the root of the “widespread folk belief that [at least] one twin is supernatural” (ibid. 6). Royal families have been known to exploit this superstition in order to demonstrate their legitimacy as rulers by grace of God.7 Obviously, there is an interesting tension here between the bastardised, adulterous, and rather dubious origins of mythological twins, and the alleged grace and divinity of the gods who bring them into the world. These are not the infallible, morally sound, and desexualised gods of the monotheistic religions, but fornicating tricksters who take what they want by force. Consequently, it is not as though a mother of twins were in any way sanctified just because she has slept with a god – quite the contrary, the woman finds herself on trial for having committed adultery, no matter if it happened with her consent or not. Twins were often “conceptualized as the punishment for the mother’s transgression” (Stewart 2003, 19), and thus discriminated against throughout history, their allegedly divine roots sometimes accounting for very little in the face of the possibility – for some, the certainty – that their mothers were unfaithful to their fathers. This also leads to the twins being conceptualised as personified dualisms: good and evil, light and dark, truth and lie. Not only are the twins, then, destined for greatness as heroes and saviours (Levy 1964, 884), they also provide midwife services to empires, civilisations, and powerful bloodlines.

34  Conceiving Twins Twins with divine origins may be quite typical for the European t­ radition – the Dioscuri cult having spread from Greece to Rome at around the sixth century B.C. – and they may constantly reappear with a remarkable degree of stability, yet they are by no means an exclusively European affair (Champlin 2011, 74–75). Various Sanskrit sources, including the Ṛgveda Saṁhitā, the Sāmaveda Saṁhitā, the Atharvaveda Saṁhitā, and the Mahābhārata, portray the divine Aśvin twins, widely known as brave warriors and wise healers, as embodied dichotomies connoting heaven and earth, day and night, sun and moon (see Jog 2005,  5–8). Similarly divine twin tropes feature in apocryphal additions to the canonical religious texts. The Apostle Thomas, whose name means ‘twin’ in Aramaic, is mentioned as Jesus’ twin brother in some sources (Frey 2006, 56–57), a constellation that will later inspire the character of Thomas Drycome in Tournier’s Gemini (1975).8 Finally, it should be added that some of this divine aura even carries over into an age as firmly agnostic as ours, as is testified by various attempts to explain the mythical aura of some of the (demi-)‘gods’ of popular culture through the fact that they were born as twins. This applies to various celebrities who are surrounded by a distinct personality cult, including Elvis Presley and Gisele Bündchen. Fraternal Rivalry Frequently, the archaic struggle between twins is the exclusive domain of brothers, who feature much more frequently in twin mythology than sisters. No doubt the near-universal existence of patriarchal kinship systems allows for the twin siblings’ relationship being strained by the struggle for primogeniture, with the result that various mythologies look “strongly biased against twins and triplets” (Pence 1998, 43). The semantisation of the sibling relationship as a fiercely competitive one is prefigured by the twin brothers’ shady origins: no wonder that Romulus and Remus were to fall out over the foundation of Rome, seeing as they were conceived in a violent, obnoxious crime when Mars, the God of War, raped a priestess. Similarly, when twins appear in the Old Testament, they are usually the result of somewhat unnatural conceptions,9 so that it is only logical that their upbringing later culminates in severe struggles for the rights of the first-born. The Bible’s original fratricidal pairing does not consist of twin brothers, but according to some sources, Cain and Abel were each born with twin sisters whom they wound up marrying (see Teugels 2003, 47–56), which may explain why the two brothers prefigure a number of violent confrontations. In the case of Esau and Jacob, this fight starts as early as in the womb – “the children struggled together within [Rebekah]” – and when their mother asks the Lord why this should be so, He informs her that her womb houses “two nations” who will

Conceiving Twins  35 forever struggle to enslave each other (Genesis 25:22–23), thus hinting at Jacob’s twelve sons who will later become the leaders of the tribes of Israel. The eventual struggle, culminating in Jacob selling his birth-right to Esau for a pottage of lentils, is foreshadowed in the ambivalent image the Biblical text produces to describe their birth: Jacob holding on to his older brother’s heel when he emerges (Genesis 25:26). Just like the tale of Romulus and Remus, the fate of Jacob and Esau underlines not only that twins, by virtue of being ‘special’, are destined for greatness, but also that civilisation is born out of violent conflict, guilt, and family feuds. Twin rivalries are tied to the foundational myths of empires and civilisations (see de Nooy 2005, 114–136); effectively, the mythological genealogy of early geopolitics reads like a family history of creation and destruction. In Tournier’s Gemini, Paul encounters Father Seelos, a priest living in the divided city of Berlin, who lectures him about how the topos of the city is firmly linked to the idea of fratricidal sacrifice. After killing Abel, Cain fled from the face of God and founded a city, the first city in human history, and called it after the name of his son, Enoch. Romulus killed Remus, then marked out the walls of Rome. Amphion crushed his twin, Zethos, beneath blocks of stone in building the walls of Thebes, and it was below the walls of that same Thebes that the twins Eteocles and Polynices slew one another. (Tournier 1975/1998, 430) Tournier’s extension of the analogy to the border-guards patrolling the Berlin wall, who must be ready to kill their German brothers, connects the mythological motif of fratricide to our day and age. Not all historiographers and philosophers dared to confront their readers with the troubling implications behind this: Cicero, in his account of the foundation of Rome, only mentions Remus in passing, possibly because he did not want his readers to “think about the possibility of a fratricidal founder” (Wiseman 1995, 11). As a result of this selective way of transmitting received wisdom, we are dealing with yet another case of ‘vanishing twin’ syndrome here, the allegedly weaker sibling struggling not only with the unequal distribution of strength, wealth, and legal estate, but also with historiographers who would prefer to negate his existence, or who only cite him, “the lesser, weaker twin,” so as to highlight “the superiority of the other” (Lash 1993, 13). Digging up the fundaments of powerful civilisations such as Rome, however, reveals the presence of sacrificial lambs: “human Bauopfer whose sacrifice would consecrate the foundation” (Wiseman 1995, 23). This is Roland Barthes’ take on mythology in practice, as history is transformed into nature, and the man-made aspects of history are camouflaged by “depoliticized speech” (Barthes 1957/2009, 154, 168). Mankind thus reconciles itself to the cell

36  Conceiving Twins division that produces life by way of fantasies about the twinned origins of the world. At the same time, the myths of twin rivalries provide us with an early taste of what modern literature has grudgingly acknowledged ever since the Shakespearean age, particularly since the nineteenth-century’s obsession with doubles: two fierce antagonists are really only two sides of the same coin, their “mimetic rivalry” escalating to such a point that they are “undifferentiated” by their conflicts, “[and] they all become doubles of one another” (Girard 1991, 185). Dangerous Proximity One of the most popular types of medical treatises of the Renaissance was the midwife manual – books that prided themselves on trying to establish a consensus between practitioners of gynaecology and midwifery, even though they often merely allowed doctors to claim authority over midwives and over the bodies of women, as part of a bigger patriarchal foray into the prohibited spaces of the childbed and the womb (see Schwanebeck 2016). The midwife manuals often align twins with the realm of the ‘unnatural’ and the ‘monstrous,’ and they illustrate their narratives about dangerous birth scenarios with drawings and etchings that show the unborn twins’ complicated entangled position inside the womb; images which are so ambiguous that it becomes hard to tell whether the two children, who are bound together via the umbilical cord or whose limbs are entwined, share an intimate embrace or whether they are struggling for survival (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1  A mbiguous embraces (Wolveridge 1671, 70; Mauriceau 1673, 250b).

Conceiving Twins  37 This ‘ambiguous embrace’ is present throughout the literary history of twinship, particularly in polysemous moments of intimacy – scenes that invoke an allegedly pure and infantile state of bliss inside the womb to give their twin entanglements a surface quality of cherubic innocence. Effectively, they hark back all the way to the Platonic half-beings who long for their unity: “[The two parts] threw their arms around one another in close embrace, desiring to be reunited, and they began to die of hunger and general inactivity because they refused to do anything at all as separate beings” (Plato 2008, 191b). However, this harmony is infused with a number of uncomfortable subtexts. Extreme spatial proximity not only breeds a prenatal form of intimacy that surpasses the strength of any other type of bond (see Stewart 2003, 63–76), it may also provoke a serious struggle for nutrition, particularly amongst monozygotic twins who, in some cases, share a placenta and blood circulation. This constellation, particularly “the dramatic and foreboding sense that interuterine conflict prefigures later difficulties or struggles”, feeds into the cultural imaginary, “especially in monotheistic cultures dominated by systems of primogeniture” (Viney 2013). Elsewhere, this kind of ‘dangerous proximity’ is sexualised and adds the incest motif into the mix. Look no further than the Book of Genesis, which contains a clandestine twinning fantasy. After all, no founding myth can fully do away with mathematical axioms, and since “duality must be produced […] from unity” (Lévi-Strauss 1995, 225), just as cell division results from a singular cell, so the Biblical creation myth can easily be read against the grain to reveal a rather juicy, incestuous subtext: as a by-product of Adam’s rib, Eve is quite literally a family member before she becomes a wife. This incestuous subtext is properly spelled out in other mythologies. According to widely held Hindu beliefs, divine twins like Yama and Yami were amongst the first humans, and some of the divine privilege that allows for rape and deception to be accommodated amongst tales of well-­ respected divinities carries over into a royal privilege regarding incestuous unions. In Egyptian mythology, Osiris is believed to have become his sister Isis’s husband while they were still inside the womb (Friedrich 1983, 19), and similar tales have been reported by the aforementioned ethnographers. In Geertz’s famous observation, “incest is less a sin than a status mistake” (Errington 1987, 403). Female twins feature more frequently in these myths than elsewhere, particularly in opposite-sex pairings. The latter invoke the idea of androgyny, with the co-presence of both sexes indicating “an original unit which has split, a unit destined to be reunited by sexual love, the ultimate symbol of human conjoining” (Heilbrun 1982, 34). The disembodied side of this argument is perfectly realised in the Platonic ideal, which is rediscovered during the Renaissance and is displayed prominently in plays such as William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601), where the harmonious bond between twin siblings Viola and ­Sebastian even extends to their astonishing physical likeness.

38  Conceiving Twins This is the benign, idealistic reading of the constellation, though by no means the universal one – much more frequently, opposite-sex twins emblematise illegitimacy, their prenatal proximity taken as a sign that the twins must have had intercourse in the womb (Levy 1964, 884). Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) outlines how Earth is made pregnant by her son, Typhœus, an unholy union that breeds the two monstrous giants Ollyphant and Argante: “Whiles in their mothers wombe enclosd they were, / Ere they into the lightsome world were brought, / In fleshly lust were mingled both yfere, / And in that monstrous wise did to the world appere” (III.vii.48). The canonical source for such fantasies of forbidden desire is one version of the Narcissus myth: not Ovid’s well-known account, but the one provided by Pausanias. In Pausanias’s version, recorded in Book IX of his Description of Greece (c. 170 AD), Narcissus does not fall in love with his own reflection – indeed, Pausanias dismisses this idea as “stupidity in the extreme.” This Narcissus longs for his twin sister, “who perfectly resembled him in her whole form,” and when she dies, he seeks consolation by staring at his own reflection in the water, “imagining that it was the image of his sister” (Pausanias 1794, 72). At the heart of these tales is a form of ‘unnatural’ desire that more subversive takes on the twin motif will later rephrase as the most natural form of desire imaginable. In most cases, however, convention dictates that one of the twins – usually the female one – must be sacrificed on the altar of taboo. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) testify to this obligation and thus pacify some of our ‘twin troubles.’ With the rise of modernism, such fantasies about perversely clean bloodlines drop retribution and dynastic annihilation in favour of something altogether more provocative. Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, 1870) presents us with the “absolute and consciously antisocial” pairing of Siegmund and Sieglinde, children of Wotan (Finney 1983, 249); Thomas Mann follows suit with the Wagner-inspired twin couple in his darkly satirical novella, Wälsungenblut (The Blood of the Walsungs, 1905), two fundamentally decadent narcissists who humiliate Sieglinde’s fiancé Beckerath. After the orgiastic climax of the novella, which sees the twins caught up in an incestuous “tumult of passion,” Siegmund declares that Beckerath “ought to be grateful to us. His existence will be a little less trivial, from now on” (Mann 1905/1955, 319). Though the spectre of this romantic trope haunts the German-speaking literary world more than it does the English-speaking one,10 the latter exhibits it as well. In an oft-quoted monologue in Manfred (1817), Lord Byron has his melancholic protagonist remember how astonishingly similar his late lover was to him: She was like me in lineaments; her eyes, Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone Even of her voice, they said were like to mine. (2.2.105–107)

Conceiving Twins  39 While the play never identifies Astarte as Manfred’s twin sister, it is easy to see why some interpretations of the play would take this absolute proclamation of agreement both in terms of body and soul as a hint to this end. At the same time, the reader’s imagination tends to run amok here, fusing the interpretation of the text with hearsay about Byron’s own well-documented obsession with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. This fallacy is characteristic of the scholarly treatment of the twin motif, which is frequently biased towards author-oriented approaches and tends to search for traces of twinship in the author’s own life.

Twinship and the Study of Literature Given the multitude of narratives that twin myths have spawned in literature across the centuries and their various re-imaginings and adaptations, one would think that the literary twin is a well-researched topic. However, one would be wrong – in fact, the few studies that systematically deal with artistic representations of twinship tend to limit themselves either to individual texts, to very narrow diachronic segments, or, on the other end of the extreme, to no more than commented bibliographies that simply paraphrase the plots of canonical twin texts. What was true for scientific contributions to twin scholarship also holds true for literary criticism. It is much more common to ‘borrow’ the twin to make another point altogether. Similar to the way they are called upon as principal witnesses in the nature/nurture debate, twins are employed as probes or exemplary literary case studies to illuminate such diverse topics as incest (Finney 1983), androgyny (Heilbrun 1982), monstrosity (Pender 1996), or authenticity and the postmodern inflation of simulacra and facsimiles (Schwartz 1996). However, twins do not yet have a (literary) history of their own, unless you consider self-contained assessments of divine twin myths that are big on philological detective work but say little about how pertinent these myths remain in this day and age and how they live on in contemporary adaptations. There is also no shortage of bibliographies and anthologies listing notable twin narratives, and the same goes for brief entries on the twin motif in encyclopaedic and diachronic literary histories as well as in handbooks of classical literary tropes, yet all too often they merely subsume the twin as a footnote under the double. The overall lack of systematic research into the literary twin is one of two major deficits worth singling out here. The other one has to do with a particular methodological shortcoming exhibited in the few existing academic studies, even in surprisingly recent ones: a particular form of narrow-mindedness that becomes manifest in the overall preoccupation with authors’ personal affiliations with the twin motif. This overemphasis on biographical contexts hardly comes as a surprise in a field of research that is brimming with autodiegetic contributors – I am talking here about the scholars who engage in this field as much as the authors

40  Conceiving Twins whose texts they study. After all, there is hardly a study of twins (be it in the field of medicine, in the social sciences, or in the humanities) which does not start with the author identifying him/herself as either a twin sibling or as a parent of twins. In the field of literary studies, the most obvious example is William Shakespeare, but he is by no means the only one. The list of authors who have been linked with unconscious twin obsessions and authorial forms of ‘schizophrenia’ such as the use of pseudonyms includes Joyce Carol Oates, Bruce Chatwin, and Mark Twain, whose pen name bears testimony to the idea of dualism,11 the idea being that there is a split here which either twinness or the writing profession may be held accountable for (Farmer 1996, 450). In an oft-quoted passage in Mosquitoes (1927), William Faulkner writes that “a book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man” (251), and there have been quite a few texts to pursue this claim and its horrific implications. The most paradigmatic work to that effect is Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1989). Not only is the book dedicated to King’s own alter ego, “the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration” (n.p.), it also reflects on literary twinship in a number of ways. Bestselling author Thad Beaumont realises that the twin brother whom he had absorbed in utero has returned to haunt him, and the late sibling enters Thad’s unconscious when he adopts a second identity, ‘George Stark,’ to write brutal thrillers that would sully his reputation as a highbrow author. When Thad retires Stark by way of a symbolic burial – a procedure that resonates with King’s own ‘killing off’ of the Bachman alter ego in the mid-1980s – Stark rises from his grave. In a manner akin to Peter Carey’s critically acclaimed meta-­literary Frankenstein pastiche, My Life as a Fake (2003), the twin revenant turns into flesh and blood, haunting the writer and killing a number of his acquaintances. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, psychoanalyst Jules Glenn published a series of articles that delve into the unconscious of a number of twentieth-century writers with a personal history of twinship. One of them is Thornton Wilder, the only survivor of a pair of identical twin brothers. The fact that Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) features such a surviving twin leads Glenn to reason that the author, tormented by lifelong guilt at being the sole survivor, tried to “keep his brother alive through reproducing him in the form of a character in a novel or play and by identifying with his dead sibling in his creations” (Glenn 1986, 628). The same thread runs through Glenn’s two papers on the works of twin brothers Anthony and Peter Shaffer (Glenn 1974a, 1974b). He argues that the theme of twinship is constantly betrayed in their plays and screenplays, which address “mutual identification, role reversal, intense rivalry and affection, as well as a desire to keep things ‘even’” (1974a, 297). Read in this fashion, Anthony Shaffer’s witty crime play, Sleuth (1970), revolves around the fantasy “of being half a person”

Conceiving Twins  41 as well as the “attempt to make up for this deficit by remaining near another” (Glenn 1974a, 293), and Glenn even makes a case for those of the Shaffers’ works which are structured around dualisms: Peter Shaffer’s one-act farce, Black Comedy (1965), not only rests on the binary opposition of light and dark, as its characters wrestle with the hilarious consequences of a power cut, but was also conceived as part of a theatrical twin bill “in which two plays are presented in the same programme, one complementing the other” (1974b, 380) – another manifestation of the author’s biographical background, according to Glenn.12 It is not my intention to ridicule these efforts. Glenn may have a point about the subconscious preoccupation of twin siblings with this lifelong theme in their writings, but if the phantom pains of ‘vanishing twin’ syndrome are really as ubiquitous as Schwartz and others have suggested, then it is by no means clear that only the writings of twins should exhibit these symptoms.13 Moreover, even those who are not outspoken opponents of psychoanalytic readings will struggle to keep a straight face at some of the examples Glenn presents to back up his view. Not only does he extend his argument to Anthony Shaffer’s work as an adaptor of other texts, like his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1971), he even goes so far as to claim that Peter Shaffer’s alleged misspelling of the Inca emperor Atahual(l)pa in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) happens for a very specific reason: “the doubling of the ‘l’ is a manifestation of the twinning in that it puts two in the place of one” (1974a, 296).14 Inevitably, such efforts make up with feverish speculation for what they lack in argumentative substance; one comes across quite a few iterations of “may have,” “must have,” and “most likely” in Glenn’s analyses. Of course, he is by no means the only one who remains convinced that “twin authors reproduce twin themes in their work, whether consciously or not” (Stewart 2003, 31). Take William Shakespeare, whose twin plays will be subject to a more comprehensive case study in Chapter 3. The proposition that Shakespeare, as a father of twins, had to write twin plays is too tempting to ignore, at least if you go by various scholarly assessments of the Shakespearean oeuvre. Not all of them belong to the pre-Roland Barthes school of ‘Ask the Author’ criticism, of which Glenn’s psychoanalytic efforts are a direct descendant. It is worth remembering that Freud’s initial interest in Hamlet did not arise from a desire to better understand the tragedy’s main character, but its creator (see Freud 1899/1974, 265). What we do in fact know about Shakespeare’s twin children amounts to very little. Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway gave birth to fraternal twins Judith and Hamnet in 1585, but to what extent Shakespeare was present in their upbringing before he moved to London to make a name for him as a playwright is not known. This has not stopped critics from concluding that Shakespeare had no choice but to reference his twin experience repeatedly in his writing. Ben Elton, for one, has worked the

42  Conceiving Twins death of Hamnet into no less than two different fictionalised accounts of Shakespeare’s life: his sitcom, Upstart Crow (2016–2018), and the melancholy biopic All Is True (2018), directed by Kenneth Branagh. Psychoanalytic critics like Glenn would have had a ball with Elton’s take on the subject, particularly because the author himself previously wrote a twin novel based on his own family history (Two Brothers, 2012) and is a father of twins himself. Such readings focus on young Hamnet more than they do on his sister: there is no ‘Judith’ in any of Shakespeare’s plays, and when critics show an interest in her, they only refer to the scandal surrounding her husband, Thomas Quiney. The case of Hamnet, on the other hand, has served as the point of departure for various readings of the plays (see Fripp 1964, 434–437; Wheeler 2000, 140–153; Greer 2007, 199–200). For Peter Ackroyd, “it defies common sense to pretend that Constance’s lament [in King John, 1596] has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare’s loss of Hamnet” (2005, 271). According to the prevailing view, Shakespeare addresses father-son relationships in greater detail from here on (Potter 2012, 205–206), the culmination being, of course, Hamlet (1603), of which Freud was by no means the last to claim that it was a reworking of Shakespeare’s own loss (see Callaghan 2013, 232–233). There are various problems with this argument, including the fact that a heartbroken, grieving Shakespeare also wrote “some of his sunniest comedies” in the immediate aftermath of Hamnet’s death (Greenblatt 2004, 290). It is not my aim to clear up this matter or to argue for its overall relevance within Shakespearean scholarship. Just as in the case of Thornton Wilder, it would be foolish to deny that experiences of loss and grief are likely to have found their way into the texts, even though we have already seen that these claims will often border on pure speculation and that viewing Shakespeare primarily as a failed patriarch “who left lines of verse, but no blood-line” (Duncan-Jones 2010, 104) is unlikely to produce fresh insight into his oeuvre. The respective scholarly work is rife with contradictions. In some accounts, Shakespeare is the bereaved father; in others, he becomes the mourning twin himself, who experiences what modern research into bereaved twins has demonstrated: that the death of a twin seems to cause a sense of desolation different in kind from other bereavements, and the surviving twin often tries to ‘compensate’ for the loss by attempting to assume the other’s identity. (Warren/Wells 1994, 21) When read in this fashion, Twelfth Night and, to a lesser degree, The Comedy of Errors (1594) become thoroughly autobiographical plays. The climactic reunion of Viola and Sebastian, in particular, is read as a

Conceiving Twins  43 symbolic exorcism of the author’s grief and a wish-fulfilment fantasy at the same time, one that “bring[s] back his son” (Pogue 2008, 82). The melodramatic rhetoric employed in studies of Twelfth Night indicates that these readings are more interested in a compelling yarn than in delivering substantial interpretation, and it strengthens the sceptical reader’s conviction that circumstantial evidence does not help to explain or clarify how Shakespeare’s plays negotiate pertinent questions of identity, gender, or class. The reason I include such readings at all is a different one: the narrative of ‘Hamnet’s death’ indicates that both Shakespeare’s plays and his biographical tale are interpreted along similar lines and with regard to similar themes. The possibility of loss is always inscribed in twin tales, as Paul’s account of his and Jean’s twin-birth in Tournier’s Gemini testifies: Entwined with my twin brother in an ovoid position, my head tucked in between his thighs as a bird hides its head under its wings to sleep, lapped in the warmth and smell that were my own, I could be deaf and blind to the unpredictable happenings taking place around us. And then came the tearing apart, the cleaver that parted us, the dreadful amputation I searched the world to cure. (Tournier 1975/1998, 55–56) No doubt Tournier delivers – no pun intended – a paradigmatic account here. What signifies a perfect supplementary design always comes with the danger of losing the supplement and thus appearing incomplete, and what can prove a man’s virility and guarantee the continuity of the bloodline may be subject to frailty, sickness, and extinction. Much is made of the fact that Shakespeare renewed his own father’s application for a coat of arms and acquired a home for the family shortly after Hamnet’s death (Wheeler 2000, 139). The loss of Hamnet, “the always-desired heir apparent who would carry the family name into the next generation” (Pogue 2008, 76), is thus instrumentalised to mark out Shakespeare as a man as much affected by grief as by fears that he could not uphold the bloodline and establish his family amongst the gentry. But it is not exactly as though we needed Shakespeare himself to see how these anxieties are facilitated via the twinship theme; in fact, Shakespearean twin farce makes similar points in a much more nuanced fashion, and it is the legacy of these plays that will be addressed in the next chapter.

Notes 1 The division is, in fact, not as clear-cut as one might think, and the field arguably underwent its most drastic paradigm changes not right after World War II, but in the 1960s. Part of the reason may be that the hereditary school

44  Conceiving Twins of thought continued to flourish in countries that carried no ideological stain in the immediate post-war era, like Great Britain (Frey 2006, 25–26). 2 To be fair, Siemens himself had been banned from his profession during the War and was far from an outspoken supporter of the regime. 3 For a detailed account of the KWI’s affiliation with NSDAP politics, see Lifton (1986, 22–44) and Schmuhl (2008, 308–312). 4 The utter schizophrenia of Verschuer’s various post-war publications must be seen to be believed. While his research efforts continue to rely on longterm longitudinal twin studies and also incorporate war-time experiences of the twin pairs, the respective years have been completely erased from his CV. Verschuer’s 1966 introduction to eugenics, which includes a chapter on the history of sterilisation, only alludes in passing to the historical events in Germany. 5 See Frey (2006, 250–281) for a more detailed account of how postcolonial literature employs the twin to illustrate ethnic conflicts. 6 The voice of her ‘Taiwo’ urges Kehinde to look at England rather than Nigeria as her true home, against the explicit wish of her conservative husband. 7 Though no statistical findings whatsoever support the idea that royalty is more likely to give birth to twins, twin pregnancies like those of Joan, wife of James I of Scotland, and of Mary Queen of Scots, have received quite a lot  of coverage (see Dewhurst 1983). Edward Champlin (2011) gives an account of how the Roman emperors modelled themselves as the legitimate successors of the Dioscuri. 8 In the French original, Drycome is called ‘Koussek’ (‘coup sec’), hinting at the infertile nature of this priest who achieves orgasm without ejaculating. 9 Rebekah and her husband Isaac, 60 years old and thus reproductively challenged, only beget Jacob and Esau when Isaac prays to the Lord (Genesis 25:21); Tamar becomes pregnant with Pharez and Zarah after she has seduced her widowed father-in-law, Judah, in the disguise of a prostitute, which leads to her being accused of being “with child by whoredom” (Genesis 38:24). The lineage of Pharez will lead directly to Jesus Christ. 10 The incestuous twin motif in the German romantic tradition, which also includes Ludwig Tieck’s novella, Der blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Blond, 1797), is examined in more detail by Finney (1983). In Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Man without Qualities, 1930–1943), siblings Ulrich and Agathe pretend to be twins in order to feel as close as possible to each other. 11 Neither of these authors is, in fact, a twin, though Penelope Farmer stresses that Oates, in the novels written under her pseudonym Rosamond Smith, frequently writes about twins (1996, 447). Richard Utz argues that the choice of twin protagonists in Chatwin’s On the Black Hill is a projection of the author’s bisexuality, with the result that Chatwin becomes “Cha-TWIN” (2004, 352). 12 In her prose adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, Marie Phillips has one of the Shakespeare clones resonate that “a long-buried memory” of his twin may be the reason that he keeps “writing twins into my plays” (Phillips 2019, 156). 13 Judith Butler has argued that the war on terrorism has produced “ungrievable lives,” that is: people who are not recognised as legitimate human beings and who are, for instance, not fully acknowledged in official discourse (Butler 2015). If this concept can be extended to “abject non-persons” like the cloned organ donors in dystopian fiction (Wasson 2011, 75–76), then surely the term can be extended to vanishing twins. 14 In fact, it is not even a misspelling. Several reference books list ‘Atahuallpa’ as a legitimate alternative or even as the preferred spelling.

Conceiving Twins  45

Works Cited Primary Texts Achebe, Chinua (1958/1998). Things Fall Apart. Oxford: Heinemann. Anon. (1997) The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Eds. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford/New York: OUP. Byron, George Gordon (1817/1959). “Manfred: A Dramatic Poem.” The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. London/New York/Toronto: OUP, 390–406. Emecheta, Buchi (1994). Kehinde. Oxford: Heinemann. Evans, Diana (2005). 26a. London: Vintage. Faulkner, William (1927/1955). Mosquitoes. New York: Liveright. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm (1812/1975). The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. King, Stephen (1989). The Dark Half. New York: Viking. Mann, Thomas (1905/1955). “The Blood of the Walsungs.” Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. Stories of Three Decades. New York: Knopf, 297–319. Orton, Joe (1969/1994). “What the Butler Saw.” The Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 361–448. Pausanias (1794). Description of Greece. Vol. 3. London: Faulder. Phillips, Marie (2019). Oh, I Do Like to Be …. London: Unbound. Spenser, Edmund (1596/1990). The Fairie Queene. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. London/New York: Longman. Tournier, Michel (1975/1998). Gemini. Trans. Anne Carter. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP.

Secondary Texts Ackroyd, Peter (2005). Shakespeare: The Biography. London: Chatto & Windus. Adams, Mark B., Garland E. Allen, and Sheila Faith Weiss (2005). “Human Heredity and Politics.” Osiris 20: 232–262. Agamben, Giorgio (1995/1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP. Alford, John R., and John R. Hibbing (2008). “The New Empirical Biopolitics.” Annual Review of Political Science 11.1: 183–203. Barthes, Roland (1957/2009). Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage. Boisvert, Danielle, and Jamie Vaske (2011). “Genes, Twin Studies, and Antisocial Behavior.” Biology and Politics: The Cutting Edge. Eds. Steven A. Peterson and Albert Somit. Bingley: Emerald, 159–183. Boomsma, Dorret, Andreas Busjahn, and Leena Peltonen (2002). “Classical Twin Studies and Beyond.” Nature Reviews Genetics 3.11: 872–882. Brancato, Sabrina (2009). Afro-Europe: Texts and Contexts. Berlin: trafo. Butler, Judith (2015). “Precariousness and Grievability: When Is Life Grievable?” Verso, www.versobooks.com/blogs/2339-judith-butler-­precariousness-andgrievability-when-is-life-grievable. Callaghan, Dympna (2013). Who Was William Shakespeare? Malden: WileyBlackwell. Campbell, Joseph (1949/2008). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato: New World.

46  Conceiving Twins Champlin, Edward (2011). “Tiberius and the Heavenly Twins.” The Journal of Roman Studies 101: 73–99. Charney, Evan (2011). “Political Science and Behavior Genetics: Rethinking Foundational Assumptions.” Biology and Politics: The Cutting Edge. Eds. Steven A. Peterson and Albert Somit. Bingley: Emerald, 115–138. Cirlot, J.E. (1990). A Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. Jack Sage. London: Routledge. de Nooy, Juliana (2005). Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dewhurst, John (1983). “Royal Twins.” Medical History 287.6409: 1937–1939. Duncan-Jones, Katherine (2010). Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. London: Methuen. Errington, Shelly (1987). “Incestuous Twins and the House Societies in Insular South-East Asia.” Cultural Anthropology 2.4: 403–444. Farber, Susan L. (1981). Identical Twins Reared Apart: A Reanalysis. New York: Basic. Farmer, Penelope (1996). Two, or: The Book of Twins and Doubles. London: Virago. Finney, Gale (1983). “Self-Reflexive Siblings: Incest as Narcissism in Tieck, Wagner, and Thomas Mann.” German Quarterly 56.2: 243–256. Fortuyn, A.B. Droogleever (1932). “Modern Research on Human Twins.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 7.3: 298–306. Foucault, Michel (2004). “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Trans. David Macey. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund (1899/1974). The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. Frey, Barbara (2006). Zwillinge und Zwillingsmythen in der Literatur. Frankfurt/London: IKO. Friedrich, Walter (1983). Zwillinge. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. Fripp, Edgar I. (1938/1964). Shakespeare: Man and Artist. London/New York/ Toronto: OUP. Gascoigne, David (1996). Michel Tournier. Oxford/Washington: Berg. Gedda, Luigi (1961). Twins in History and Science. Trans. Marco Milani-­ Comparetti. Springfield: Thomas. Girard, René (1991). A Theater of Envy. New York/Oxford: OUP. Glenn, Jules (1974a). “Twins in Disguise: A Psychoanalytic Essay on Sleuth and The Royal Hunt of the Sun.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 43.2: 288–302. Glenn, Jules (1974b). “Twins in Disguise, II: Content, Form and Style in Plays by Anthony and Peter Shaffer.” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 1: 373–381. Glenn, Jules (1986). “Twinship Themes and Fantasies in the Work of Thornton Wilder.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 41: 627–651. Greenblatt, Stephen (2004). Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York/London: Norton. Greer, Germaine (2007). Shakespeare’s Wife. New York: Harper Collins. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. (1982). Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Knopf. Horwitz, Allan V., et al. (2003). “Rethinking Twins and Environments.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 44.2: 111–129.

Conceiving Twins  47 Jog, Keshav P. (2005) Aśvin: The Twin Gods in Indian Mythology, Literature and Art. Delhi: Pratibha Prakashan. Joseph, Jay (2015). The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. London/New York: Routledge. Kingsley, Mary H. (1897/2003). Travels in West Africa. Mineola/New York: Dover. Korinthenberg, Gerd (2008). “Double Blessing: The Twin Figures of the Ewe.” Ewe: Twin Figures. Ed. Henricus Simonis. Cologne: König, 9–14. Lange, Johannes (1929). Verbrechen als Schicksal: Studien an kriminellen Zwillingen. Leipzig: Thieme. Lash, John (1993). Twins and the Double. London: Thames & Hudson. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1995). The Story of Lynx. Trans. Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Levy, Jerrold E. (1964). “The Fate of Navajo Twins.” American Anthropologist 66.4: 883–887. Lifton, Robert Jay (1986). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Lotze, Reinhold (1937). Zwillinge. Oehringen: Rau. Mauriceau, Francis (1673). The Accomplisht Midwife, Treating of the Diseases of Women with Child, and in Child-Bed. Trans. Hugh Chamberlen. London. Mittler, Peter (1971). The Study of Twins. London: Penguin. Newman, Horatio H. (1941). “Aspects of Twin Research.” The Scientific Monthly 52.2: 99–112. Newman, Horatio H., Frank N. Freeman, and Karl J. Holzinger (1937). Twins: A Study of Heredity and Environment. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Nordrum, Amy (2014). “Twins: A Gold Mine for Research.” The Atlantic, www. theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/twins-a-gold-mine-for-research/ 378697/. Oruene, Taiwo (1985). “Magical Powers of Twins in the Socio-Religious Beliefs of the Yoruba.” Folklore 96.2: 208–16. Palmer, Brian (2011). “Double Inanity: Twin Studies Are Pretty Much Useless.” Slate, www.slate.com/articles/life/twins/2011/08/double_inanity.html. Pence, Gregory E. (1998). Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning? Lanham: ­Rowman & Littlefield. Pender, Stephen (1996). “‘No Monsters at the Resurrection’: Inside Some Conjoined Twins.” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis/London: U of Minnesota P, 143–167. Plato (2008). The Symposium. Trans. Margaret C. Howatson. Cambridge: CUP. Pogue, Kate Emery (2008). Shakespeare’s Family. Westport/London: Praeger. Pook, Lizzie (2016). “‘I’ve Never Needed Anyone Else’: Life as an Identical Twin.” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/29/ identical-twin-never-needed-anyone-else. Potter, Lois (2012). The Life of William Shakespeare. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Rife, David C. (1941). “Heredity and Twins.” The Scientific Monthly 53.2: 148–154. Schmitz-Emans, Monika (2012). “Zwillinge/Doppelgänger.” Metzler Lexikon literarischer Symbole. Eds. Günter Butzer and Joachim Jacob. Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 502–504.

48  Conceiving Twins Schmuhl, Hans-Walter (2008). The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945: Crossing Boundaries. Dordrecht: Springer. Schwanebeck, Wieland (2016). “The Womb as a Battlefield: Debating Medical Authority in the Renaissance Midwife Manual.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 23.2: 101–114. Schwartz, Hillel (1996). The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books. Segal, Nancy L. (1999). Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us about Human Behavior. New York: Dutton. Segal, Nancy L. (2011). “The Value of Twin Studies: A Response to Slate Magazine.” Twin Research and Human Genetics 14.6: 593–597. Segal, Nancy L. (2017). Twin Mythconceptions: False Beliefs, Fables, and Facts about Twins. London: Academic. Siemens, Hermann Werner (1924). Die Zwillingspathologie. Berlin: Springer. Stärk, Ekkehard (1989). Die ‘Menaechmi’ des Plautus und kein griechisches Original. Tübingen: Narr. Stewart, Elizabeth (2003). Exploring Twins: Towards a Social Analysis of Twinship. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Teugels, Lieve M. (2003). Eve’s Children: The Biblical Stories Retold and Interpreted in Jewish and Christian Traditions. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Thorndike, Edward L. (1905). “Measurement of Twins.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 2.20: 547–553. Turner, Victor (1969/1995). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Utz, Richard (2004). “Das Zwillingspaar aus Chatwinshire: Auf dem schwarzen Berg als Utopie.” Paare und Paarungen. Eds. Ulrich Müller, Margarete Springeth, and Michaela Auer-Müller. Stuttgart: Heinz, 343–353. Verschuer, Otmar Frhr. von (1933). “Neue Ergebnisse der Zwillingsforschung.” Archiv für Gynäkologie 156.1–2: 362–375. Verschuer, Otmar Frhr. von (1939). “Twin Research from the Time of Francis Galton to the Present-Day.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 128.850: 62–81. Verschuer, Otmar Frhr. von (1954). Wirksame Faktoren im Leben des Menschen: Beobachtungen an ein- und zweieiigen Zwillingen durch 25 Jahre. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Verschuer, Otmar Frhr. von (1966). Eugenik. Witten: Luther. Viney, William (2013). “The Significance of Twins in the Middle Ages.” The Wonder of Twins, https://thewonderoftwins.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/ the-significance-of-twins-in-medieval-and-early-modern-europe/. Vogt-William, Christine (2015). “Meeting Mr. Hyde and Dr. Stone: Mixed Race Twins and White Fathers in Diane Evans’ 26a and Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone.” Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy. Vol. 2. Eds. Sarah Barbour et al. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 135–154. Warren, Roger, and Stanley Wells (1994). “Introduction” and “Notes”. Twelfth Night. By William Shakespeare. Oxford/New York: OUP, 1–76 and 85–221. Wasson, Sara (2011). “‘A Butcher’s Shop Where the Meat Still Moved’: Gothic Doubles, Organ Harvesting and Human Cloning.” Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010. Eds. Sara Wasson and Emily Alder. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 73–86.

Conceiving Twins  49 Watson, Peter (1982). Twins: An Uncanny Relationship? New York: Viking. Wheeler, Richard P. (2000). “Death in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.2: 127–153. Weiss, Sheila Faith (2010). “After the Fall: Political Whitewashing, Professional Posturing, and Personal Refashioning in the Postwar Career of Otmar ­Freiherr von Verschuer.” Isis 101.4: 722–758. Wiseman, Timothy P. (1995). Remus: A Roman Myth. Cambridge: CUP. Wolveridge, James (1671). Speculum Matricis; or, the Expert Midwives Handmaid. London. Wright, Lawrence (1997). Twins and What They Tell Us about Who We Are. New York: Wiley & Sons.

3 Confusing Twins

The Stain of Farce In establishing the link between twins and the genre of farce, one runs the risk of reiterating the prejudice that permeates so much scholarship on the literary motif of twinship: that it is solely ‘inferior’ genres that employ the twin trope, whereas more ‘serious’ literature opts for doubles and doppelganger figures of a different kind. While no-one can deny that farce has often provided a fertile ground for the twin motif, it presents by no means the only home for it. Twins are equally at home in a variety of different genres, including detective fiction and the dystopian novel, and even when they are present in farce, they often exceed the most obvious semantisation, that is: the confusion that arises from the unlikely co-presence of long-lost twin siblings who throw each other’s mundane existence in turmoil. While this is undeniably a popular way of exploiting twins for comic effect,1 it is far from being the only comic strategy at work. A similarly unjustified allegation is voiced in studies of detective fiction, as critics mock ‘whodunits’ and other tales of detection in which twins make last-minute appearances to provide a resolution to seemingly impossible scenarios (“It was not him – it was his evil twin brother!”). As a matter of fact, this plot pattern does not occur so very frequently, after all. And while the twin provides a popular plot gimmick in farce, it cannot be reduced to its role as a generic MacGuffin of mistaken identity. The fact that it connotes a considerably more complex and layered form of dynastic trouble has seldom been touched upon in critical assessments of farce. No doubt the genre’s awful reputation is to blame, and the critical standing of William Shakespeare’s twin plays is rather indicative of that. While Twelfth Night (1601) is regularly revived and studied, and many of its characters and lines have entered collective memory and the popular idiom, respectively, The Comedy of Errors (1594) is widely considered a lesser play that does not yet betray the complexity of later works, an emerging playwright’s negligible training exercise, deemed important only with the benefit of hindsight, that is: in view of greater things to come. No other comedy (with the possible exception of As You Like It,

Confusing Twins  51 1603) is as much indebted to one source text, and critics have frequently taken issue with the play’s alleged lack of artistic ambition. Evidently, Shakespeare’s strong affiliation with the genre of farce is treated like an embarrassment by his admirers, and The Comedy of Errors is considered little more than “an afterpiece” (Whitworth 2008, 4), one that echoes the literal meaning of the term ‘farce’ as it occurred in the kitchen glossary: convenient filler-material (or ‘stuffing’) to flesh out the theatrical bill, a negligible side dish to supplement the main course; not very wholesome, but enough to appease the customers (Hughes 1956/1979, 23). Much of this disdain comes courtesy of a kind of intellectual xenophobia: farce had to be an inferior genre because it was a continental import, and in (twin) farce, foreign blood continues to be an exonerating circumstance once everyone has calmed down and the general turmoil has faded. In William Rider’s The Twins (1640), Gratiano forgives his wife Charmia, who has been lusting after his twin brother, for the sole reason that her “desire and lust” are “the general disease of Italy” and “not thine” (Rider 1640/1655, 46). Farce remains popular and continues to sell out West End theatres, yet the genre has never really managed to shake off its reputation as, to quote John Dryden’s famous assessment, “the Extremity of bad Poetry” (1692/1762, n.p.). Even before Dryden, “the naming of a work as a farce [was] more likely to be accompanied by an apology” (Holland 2000, 107), unless its author had some ‘proper’ credentials to show. This applies to Dryden as much as it does to George Bernard Shaw, who called farce “an unsympathetic enjoyment, and therefore an abuse of nature” (1896/1954, 229–230), thus scorning the very genre that he occasionally relied upon to pay his bills. You Never Can Tell (1897), Shaw’s most straightforward romantic comedy, illustrates that twin farce and Shakespearean clowning were not beneath this social reformer, who goes so far as to include an observant character named William who is complimented on being rather “like Shakespear [sic]” (Shaw 1897/1958, 247). In the twentieth century, farce was to gain some prestige from its close affiliation with the theatre of the absurd, for the existential clowning of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon owes as much of a debt to modern philosophy as to the zanni clowns of the commedia dell’arte tradition. Harold Pinter’s dark ‘comedies of menace’ bear the moniker of farce proudly, as do Michael Frayn’s meta-theatrical revisions of the genre, but no such case was ever made for an author like Ray Cooney, the self-proclaimed ‘Master of Farce,’ whose website boasts quotes from a variety of tabloid newspapers but few endorsements from highbrow publications. Joe Orton, the ‘enfant terrible’ of the English stage of the 1960s, sits between both camps: his television play Funeral Games (1968) was originally called The Comedy of Horrors and thus provocatively referenced Shakespeare (Lahr 1986, 113), and he revisits the twin motif in What the Butler Saw (1969).

52  Confusing Twins When the plays, according to the critics, lack substance, all the Wildean aphorisms and all the carefully crafted misunderstandings count for nothing, and indeed, it is typical of farce to indicate that its flawed characters will stumble on as though nothing had happened once the mess has been cleared up, which is, of course, the very point: a quite radical, defeatist statement on human nature, and one that remains oblivious to theatre’s alleged vocation as a ‘moral institution’ (Schiller). Ray Cooney is one of a number of authors to claim that farce is actually “more akin to tragedy than it is to comedy” (2014), and if critics mock his efforts as distinctly ‘low comedy,’ they might as well extend their critique to human nature itself. An ‘evil twin’ like Young Wou’dbe (in George Farquhar’s The Twin-Rivals, 1702) has no trouble corrupting everyone else, because in farce, the characters are already corrupt to begin with: the steward is guilty of embezzlement, the attorney regularly forges wills, and the police are happy to accept bribes. Larry David, whose ground-breaking and cynical sitcoms Seinfeld (1990–1998) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–) milk fundamentally farcical plots for cringeworthy situations of discomfort and embarrassment, famously proclaimed for his characters: “no hugging, no learning” (qtd. in Armstrong 2016, 61). While this chapter does not set out to exonerate the genre of farce, it will make use of the latter’s close affiliation with the twin trope in order to explore some of its more troubling subtexts and also to argue for the importance of twinship on stage. Following an examination of the ‘surface’ phenomena of plot and the stage mechanisms of twin farce, the discussion will highlight the demonic themes, monstrous birth fantasies, and dynastic troubles at the heart of these plays. I will mainly draw upon Shakespeare’s two twin plays, but also trace their legacy in various other twin farces. 2 In so doing, I will show how these texts prescribe a cure for their self-afflicted ‘twin troubles’ by resorting to the realm of reproduction and by incorporating the twins into dynastic kinship systems.

The Poetics of Twin Farce Twin Plots In their acclaimed mash-up of all of Shakespeare’s plays into a twohour theatrical event, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (1987), the members of the Reduced Shakespeare Company also dedicate some space to Shakespearean comedy. Their viciously complex synopsis of what they present as a non-existent quintessential Shakespearean comedy features a Spanish Duke and his six daughters, “three beautiful and virginal sets of identical twins,” who fall in love with “[t]he long-lost children of the duke’s brother, also coincidentally three sets of identical twins” (Borgeson/Long/Singer 1987/1994, 38–39).

Confusing Twins  53 This distinct emphasis on the twin motif as a stereotypical Shakespearean plot device comes as a bit of a surprise, given that there are only two Shakespeare plays that feature twin siblings,3 but it bespeaks the popularity of these two plays as well as their impact in terms of the popularisation of the twin trope on stage, particularly in the genre of farce. The plots of Shakespeare’s twin plays show so many similarities that it is possible to distil their plots into one synopsis to fit both (Mercer 1989, 26–27), which makes them not just plays about twins, but actual twin plays – astonishingly similar in their appearance, like the two Antipholi whom Duke Solinus must ask “[to] stand apart” as he “know[s] not which is which” (5.1.365). However, their relation is one of inversion rather than exact correspondence: in the earlier of the two plays, each brother is unaware of the close proximity of his sibling, yet their presence significantly affects the plot; in Twelfth Night, by contrast, both siblings are acutely aware of their missing half, yet the twin motif as such plays only second fiddle to the complications that arise from Viola’s gender masquerade and the Malvolio subplot. Though some degree of confusion is indispensable in all of Shakespeare’s comedies – consider the identity crises that befall his cross-­ dressing heroines, or the various schemes that must be untangled before the temporary journeys to the “green world” (Frye 1957/1990, 182) conclude in multiple marriages – The Comedy of Errors requires a suspension of disbelief unrivalled in the Shakespearean oeuvre. This is farce’s prerogative, of course; Elizabeth Inchbald suggests that the ghosts and witches that haunt Shakespeare’s other plays seem rather probable when compared to the outrageous coincidence of his farce (1808, 3–4). During a sea voyage, the Syracusian merchant Egeon loses half his family, as both his wife and one of his newly born twin sons are believed to be lost at sea. Unbeknownst to Egeon, who brings up the surviving son all by himself, both his wife and his son Antipholus have survived the shipwreck and started a new life in the city of Ephesus. Thirty-three years later, Egeon and his son (who, to make matters worse and potentially more hilarious, carries the same name as his brother) arrive in Ephesus by chance, and the appearance of the lost twin brother leads to various complications, as the two are, of course, each other’s spitting image. In having the two Antipholi constantly be mistaken for each other, Shakespeare reproduces the set-up of his Plautinian source, Menaechmi (The Brothers Menaechmus, 200 B.C.); the seemingly secure and respectable position of Antipholus of Ephesus crumbling underneath him when his family and his homosocial network suddenly suspect him of being a swindler, an adulterer, and a raging madman. Shakespeare even outbids Plautus by introducing yet another twin pairing to the proceedings: the two Dromios, who work as slaves for the two Antipholi and who are equally unaware of having a sibling; a plot device that produces even more mix-ups in order to stretch the joke to five acts. The template

54  Confusing Twins proved so successful it would continue to be milked for laughs throughout the history of stage comedy, not only in Errors’ various adaptations and appropriations, but also in other twin farces, where it is neither fully fledged character development nor subtle pacing that drives the plots. The fun lies in urgency and acceleration, as the ‘mistaken identity’ plot imposes a strict timeframe, with the effect that twin farce frequently spans a single day and the characters must work against the clock. Unlike its elder sibling, Twelfth Night is in no danger of being relegated to the margins of the Shakespearean canon or of being overlooked. The play has been singled out as one of Shakespeare’s most fully realised plays, possibly because it is not quite as farcical as Errors and its farcical qualities do not depend on the presence of twins: it is only in the last scene of Act 3 that anybody confuses the twins for one another. In direct juxtaposition with its densely plotted, hyperactive predecessor, Twelfth Night’s farcical ambitions seem modest, which highlights the tautological line of argument critics invoke in order to denigrate twin farces. They call the use of twins in farce unimaginative but consider only those farces that resort to the stereotypical use of the trope they have in mind. Interestingly, then, as one of Shakespeare’s twin comedies is criticised for having ‘too much’ plot, and the other one for having ‘too little,’ the two plays enjoy a somewhat supplementary relationship, which mirrors the typical character dualism of twins in comedy. Most of the time, they are not fleshed out individually, but rather represent one stock half of a dynamic character. Whereas Antipholus of Syracuse is a spiritual and sentimental character who relies on his trusty servant to cheer him up “[w]hen I am dull with care and melancholy” (1.2.20), his brother, Antipholus of Ephesus, embodies materialism, lust, and inebriation. It is only by combining both brothers into one that Shakespeare conveys “the image of a whole human being” (Gay 2008, 22). Similarly, the two brothers in Joseph Derrick’s Twins (1884) inhabit opposite ends of the social scale. One of them is a respected clergyman and academic, the other a street-smart waiter who regularly goes on drinking sprees, with the comedy deriving from the chiastic arrangement of their behaviour. It is the working-class trickster who reveals himself to be a shepherd for his community and who is happy to act as a match-maker, while the dignified bishop embodies some of the worst stereotypes associated with the working-class. Not only is he constantly on the verge of swearing, he also spreads a lot of ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge’ and innuendo, referring to his own vocation as one that has “[its] fingers in every pie” and “grope[s] round for the plums” (Derrick 1884/1910, 12). With its merciless ‘tit for tat’ logic, farce depends upon such a symmetrical arrangement. In distributing virtue and vice amongst the siblings, the plays prove quite adaptable to the moral and theatrical framework of their time. Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals shows the imprint of contemporary rake comedies (Rothstein 1964, 36–37) by giving Young Wou’dbe

Confusing Twins  55 clear overtones of the archetypical panto villain: an embittered hunchback whose schemes evoke memories of Richard III, which leaves the role of the model son for the elder brother, Hermes. John Poole’s The Hole in the Wall (1813) and A.R. Gurney’s The Perfect Party (1986) are more layered riffs on the cliché, as the twins spring from the imagination of one of the characters here. Poole’s angelic Emily conjures up the disorderly fantasy of her twin sister Flirtilla [sic], who is “all vanity and affectation” (Poole 1813, 15), while Gurney’s suburban middle-class academic Tony invents his alter ego Tod as a dangerous, cocksure womaniser with “Byronic appeal” (Gurney 1986/1989, 220). Seeing Double In his essay on laughter, Henri Bergson identifies three fundamental comic principles that, once put in motion on the stage, ‘mechanise’ behaviour: repetition, inversion, and the reciprocal interference of series (Bergson 1900/1994, 119–126). All of them lend themselves naturally to farce, most fervently so in twin farce, where the reduplication of a character in physiognomy and appearance often goes together with an inversion of characteristics, which in turns leads to a game of dramatic hide-and-seek, in the course of which other characters constantly misinterpret the twins’ actions and behaviour. The farcical exits and entries of two characters that are each other’s spitting image provide ample opportunity for repetition and inversion, and even the somewhat more complex phenomenon of two independent series of events ‘meeting’ in a shared event that is interpreted differently by both parties can be found quite frequently. In Derrick’s Twins, Professor Spinach collects donations for the “Hindoo General Advancement Society” in order to convert colonised subjects to Christianity, with the result that his twin brother Timothy keeps getting offered donations “[f]or your Hindoos,” which he takes to refer to his six children (Derrick 1884/1910, 4 and 22). In Zanzibar (2018), Inside No. 9’s hilarious homage to The Comedy of Errors, one of the twin brothers orders an apple tart to his hotel room, while the other one is waiting for another ‘tart’ (a prostitute), with predictable results. Of course, neither of these Bergsonian devices is limited to twin comedies, and doubleness is a major Shakespearean trope worked into the texture of most of his plays. Yet it is The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Nigaht that feature the biggest number of symmetries and mirroring effects, both on the level of composition and that of the stage apparatus. In addition, there is linguistic twin play at work here: grammatical idiosyncrasies emphasise the tension between unity and duality (Whitworth 2008, 89), The Comedy of Errors features more rhymes than the other comedies, and there is no shortage of puns and double entendres to intensify the farcical notion of gradually losing control over everything,

56  Confusing Twins including one’s semantics. Twelfth Night’s rhetoric betrays a significant debt to double structures: antithesis, anaphora, chiasmus, and puns (Maguire 2007, 154), the latter a speciality of Feste the Clown – when he swears that he “live[s] by the church,” he only means the location of his dwellings (3.1.3). The pun, in particular, is of fundamental importance in twin farce. By “making a word function simultaneously as itself and its own twin” (Zinman 1991, 314), puns impose their twisted logic on the plot and the dramatis personae, which consists of literal ‘minimal pairs’: embodied jokes with close onomastic affiliation such as Antipholus of Syracuse/ Antipholus of Ephesus (The Comedy of Errors), Timothy/Titus Spinach (Twins), Elder/Young Wou’dbe (The Twin Rivals), or Elizabeth/Elisabeth Kerner (Two Much) – ‘two’ much indeed. When the twins do not act as each other’s moral supplement, they serve as mouthpieces for stichomythic dialogue, as in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, where the Clandon twins tend to speak as one until someone begs them to be silent: “We do [talk too much]”, Philip admits. “Shut up, both” (Shaw 1897/1958, 217). In a wider sense, all farce is twin farce, not just because it allows linguistic ambiguities and double-speak to reign supreme, but also in that it relies on rogues and tricksters who have to adopt a form of double-play in order to come out on top. Viewed from this angle, Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals is almost a meta-farcical play, for it features a pair of twin brothers yet deliberately produces its twin effects only in other characters. At one point, Young Wou’dbe complains that his partner in crime, a sexually voracious judge, is “an honest fellow in his cups” yet a rogue when he is sober” (Farquhar 1702/1795, 19); a constellation that prefigures Chaplin’s most farcical feature-length film, City Lights (1931), where the utterly schizophrenic, boozing millionaire only recognises the tramp when drunk. It is the same kind of Janus-faced behaviour that Shakespeare’s bystanders witness in Antipholus of Ephesus who, thanks to the twin brother he never knew he had, suddenly transforms into a raging maniac and thus enacts the very condition of farce: its reliance on deceitful double-play, which culminates in paradoxical insights into the nature of identity. Art Dodge, the main character in Donald Westlake’s Two Much (1975), is an impostor who invents a twin in order to seduce two wealthy heiresses, and he soon finds himself making rather schizophrenic telephone calls and having conversations with himself in the form of inner monologues. It is a running gag across the history of twin farce that even the twin siblings themselves at one point lose track of which one they are – think of One for the Pot (1963), where Rupert and Billy repeatedly have to resort to simple arithmetic in order to establish their own identities: “Two and two?” – “Four.” – “You’re Rupert” (Cooney/Hilton 1963/1990, 36). The back catalogue of theatre’s great farceurs illustrates to what extent the genre depends on ‘seeing double’, with many classic comedies

Confusing Twins  57 announcing their obligatory dual structure in their titles. This is true of John Poole’s Who’s Who?, or The Double Imposture (1815), and of Carlo Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters, 1746), which features the Twelfth Night-inspired constellation of twin sister impersonating her late twin brother, not to mention Richard Bean’s highly successful adaptation of the Goldoni play, One Man, Two Guvnors (2011). Ray Cooney, the genre’s indisputable king, not only produced titles like Two into One (1981) or Twice in a Lifetime (1997), but also plotted plays about royal doppelgangers (Her Royal Highness, 1981) and, in his most enduring success, about a bigamist who must deal with the consequences of his two households colliding (Run for Your Wife, 1982). As structural devices, deception and double-play account for the similarly schizophrenic nature of farce’s dramatis personae: frequently, the actors must play double, in that the plot requires the characters to pass as someone else in order to substantiate their exclusive claim to the family fortune (One for the Pot), to avoid getting married to the wrong person (The Hole in the Wall), or just to get a decent review in the papers (The Perfect Party). There is a commentary on the fragility of all social customs and decorum here. Appearances and manners may be civil, but once the adulterous affairs are plotted, once keys have changed hands, and once bedroom doors have been unlocked, the mask of civilisation comes off and the id is unleashed: horny, greedy, and malicious. Farquhar’s preface to his Twin Rivals, written in response to the play’s disastrous reception, asserts as much when he claims that characters who are “too mean for heroic […] must of necessity drop into comedy” (Farquhar 1702/1795, vii). In farce, most of the characters’ frantic actions are spent trying to regain face (or rather, the more presentable one of their faces) and to swear eternal loyalty to their super-ego, as the consequences of the id taking over prove too disastrous to endure. On stage, the snowball effect that arises when complications and problems pile up demands a precise choreography of doors opening and closing, a form of “illogicality” that requires the “most logical” organisation (Davis 1978, 23). As a consequence, the italicised stage directions and paratextual notes frequently outweigh the actual dialogue. One for the Pot requires a man “[of] approximately the same build and within an inch of the principal actor’s height”, who “must only appear and move with his back to the audience” (Cooney/Hilton 1963/1990, n.p.). When properly rehearsed and skilfully executed, the effect is that of a conjurer’s sleight of hand, tricking the audience into looking in the wrong direction so that the switch remains unnoticed (Smith 1989, 86–87) and ‘corpo-reality’ (or the illusion of it) exceeds the limits of comprehension. No other genre, then, is so much taken with the technical nitty-gritty that constitutes the theatrical experience, and if there is one argument critics bring up in favour of Shakespeare’s much-maligned Comedy of Errors, it is this one: that the structural requirements of farce allow the

58  Confusing Twins playwright to hone his technique, resulting in the only Shakespeare play apart from The Tempest (1611) that observes the three unities.4 Its neat construction and extreme tempo are essential in order for the farcical plot to work, which asks the viewers to suspend disbelief on numerous occasions and which has “to be seen to be (dis)believed” (Whitworth 2008, 43). This has led to the popular assumption that the play quickly wears thin on the page, while it plays an important role in spearheading theatrical innovation when it comes to stagecraft and visual trickery. Critics continue to frown upon Victorian theatre, for example, even though it pioneered noticeable gimmicks like the famous ‘Corsican trap,’ designed for a twin play.5 Wherever it is staged, farce offers proof that comedy can have its cake and eat it. It commits to the Bergsonian idea that comedy can break down life’s general aversion to “repetition or complete similarity” (Bergson 1900/1994, 82), and it adopts the utterly linear logic of the chase by insisting on what the triangular structure of the stage plot, with its pronounced emphasis on symmetry and its double turning point of anagnorisis and peripeteia in the middle so vehemently denies: that the action is a complete uphill struggle where absolutely nothing is ever cleared up or alleviated before the climactic detonation. Present the characters with just one problem to solve after the other and you get the (set-)piecemeal of burlesque,6 but present them with twins and you introduce the possibility of multiplication and thus of exponential growth. It is hardly a coincidence that the initials of Arthur Drew Dodge, Westlake’s ­pseudo-twin in Two Much, spell the acronym ‘ADD,’ indicating a commitment to snowball-like accumulation, and in Orton’s What the Butler Saw, Geraldine is similarly spot-on when she tells her twin brother that he is “multiplying our problems not dividing them” (Orton 1969/1994, 419). Just before the climactic dénouement, a valid plot summary in twin farce may read something like the one given in One for the Pot, as Rupert struggles to account for his weird behaviour: When I first arrived I said I was who I was. When I met you I had to say I was who I wasn’t. Then I had to be who I said I was when I wasn’t when I really wanted to be who I was when I said I was. Now I want you to know that I’m not who I said I was when I wasn’t but who I was when I said I was who I was. (Cooney/Hilton 1963/1990, 100) Dénouements Farce is usually considered to work better on stage than on the page, but at the same time, its critics argue that it may leave its audience exhausted. George Bernard Shaw famously complained that “three acts of farce is too much for human endurance” (Shaw 1896/1954, 229–230).

Confusing Twins  59 Shaw may have a point, but the enduring appeal of theatrical blockbusters such as Frayn’s Noises Off (1982) suggests that theatre audiences may be more forgiving than that. In fact, farce’s biggest enemy might not be the performance time itself but the customary interval between the second and third acts, for it allows the audience to temporarily dislodge itself from the avalanche of confusion. William Woods, one of several eighteenth-century stage-men who adapted The Comedy of Errors, cut the play down into a three-act “After-piece,” arguing that “the Judgment will not be so much offended, having less Time to reflect on the Improbability of the Events” (1780, iii). Nearly two centuries later came Psycho (1960), famously advertised as the film that would not allow anyone admission once it had already started. And what is Psycho but a radical, grand guignol iteration of farce’s most clichéd tropes and stage effects? Think of the star-crossed lovers, the bag with the stolen money, the nosy investigator, and the uptight voyeur who happens to be a literal schizophrenic and who must resort to improvisation in order to avoid detection and shaming. In fact, Hitchcock may rarely have dabbled in straightforward comedy, but he remains one of cinema’s greatest farceurs, a conjuror whose cinematic box of tricks includes not just countless doppelgangers, but also the occasional pair of twins.7 Twelfth Night’s Viola is not the only one for whom the knot proves “too hard […] t’untie” (2.2.40) as the plot progresses, and it requires a cathartic detonation to clear up everything. Given the amount of confusion and the degree of complexity which have accumulated in the previous scenes, the farcical climax often proves surprisingly straightforward and short. Both the final acts of The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night consist of just one scene: once the twins come face to face with each other, all loose ends are tied up rather conveniently, and the rhetoric becomes all exclamation and assertion in the face of the visual spectacle. Both Errors and Twelfth Night save their most stunning ‘visual effects,’ the twins meeting in person, for their climactic scenes, as the confusion that has been brought about by shipwrecks and temporary displacements is cleared up. While the co-presence of twins often serves as the play’s particular selling point to set it apart from the competition, the execution on stage frequently denies its audience the required ‘money shot,’ for unless the play is structured in a way that prohibits the twins from ever appearing on stage together, the climax presents its viewers with the crucial ordeal of perceiving two actors, presumably unrelated, standing side by side. The flabbergasted reactions that the co-players must show when ‘seeing double’ are frustrated unless the audience fully suspends disbelief, for the actors are unlikely to actually be each other’s spitting image. The Comedy of Errors, for one, has rarely been staged with actual twins, and Twelfth Night requires an even bigger leap of faith by asking the viewers to believe in the complete likeness of opposite-sex twins – Sir Andrew confuses Sebastian for his cross-dressing sister, and

60  Confusing Twins according to Antonio, “[a]n apple cleft in two is not more twin/Than these two creatures” (5.1.221–222). The explanation that Shakespeare grants his audience is thin: Viola points to her mourning rites in order to excuse her similarity to her brother (3.4.391–393), which is hardly enough to fill the evident plot-hole. Later, Shaw will adapt the Viola/ Sebastian pairing and its enigmatic resemblance in You Never Can Tell’s Dolly and Philip Clandon. This is not the only thing that twin farce must get away with during its climactic dénouement, as the audience is asked not only to buy into the fiction of similarity, but also to forgive the characters’ utter ignorance. As the siblings have allowed the laws of farce to interfere with their agency, they have not contemplated the solution that has been in front of them all the time: they have been mistaken for identical-looking siblings. The celebration of restored family ties is thus often sidelined in favour of everyone’s epistemic relief: at last, we are in the know. [Y]ou have all been confounding me with my long lost twin brother, Timothy Spinach. […] MR. ARRACK . Then I see it all. ALL. We see it all! MRS. GRANBY. Titus, I see it all. TITUS. And Emma, I see it all. (Derrick 1884/1910, 47) TITUS.

Seeing is tantamount to understanding, nowhere more so than in Twelfth Night, “Shakespeare’s most intensely visual play” which is “centred on exquisitely ocular events” (Elam 2014, 101). As eye-witnesses, the characters themselves have trouble catching up with the audience, and when they put into words what has happened, this has already been obvious for some time to the spectator. The verbal reiteration of the unlikely sight neither serves the plot nor is it required for the audience to process what has been going on. It rather emphasises that we are witnessing an anagnorisis in the most literal sense of the word, “a change from ignorance to knowledge” (Aristotle 1987, 43), so as to allow even the most dim-witted of farcical heroes to understand what has happened. It is a literal double-­ take avant la lettre, a comic staple perfected by James Finlayson, who acted as the comic foil in dozens of Laurel and Hardy films, including their own adaptation of The Comedy of Errors (which I will discuss in the next chapter). By implication, we are not only asked to root for two-dimensional, flat characters, but for idiots who are interchangeable enough for the First Folio edition to mix up their names on more than one occasion (Wells et al. 1987, 266). In many twin farces, the characters are perfectly aware that they have twin siblings, yet Shakespeare’s Viola is an absolute exception in that she suspects her brother’s presence

Confusing Twins  61 to be the reason for the chaos: “Prove true, imagination, O prove true,/ That I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you!” (3.4.384–385) There clearly is an epistemological blindspot here, as the characters must face disturbing (corpo-)realities which strongly suggest “that different characters might share the same identity” (Cartwright 2009, 128). The siblings are not as unique as they have assumed all their lives, and Antipholus of Syracuse, who is not only aware that he has a twin brother but also spends his life searching for him, remains baffled as to why he is “[k]nown unto these, and to myself disguised” (2.2.217). Therefore, the reunion scene that concludes Twelfth Night is not so much about anagnorisis but about the process of identification and authentication, which may account for the overall subdued atmosphere on stage. Twelfth Night thus emphasises the paradoxical idea that the twins are never as isolated as when they catch up with their ‘missing half’ and acknowledge their lack of uniqueness. Viola is forced to abandon the gender masquerade and thus bids farewell to her liberties, and both twins are married off to partners who use their newly established familial connection to strengthen their respective mercantile and economic position, the dynastic implications of which I will return to shortly. The Comedy of Errors does not opt for the same low-key resolution, yet when the Duke identifies “[t]hese two Antipholus’, these two so like,/ And these two Dromios, one in semblance” (5.1.348–349), he spells out hard truths regarding the struggle for singularity. The twins are not even granted individual names, and the two servants are ultimately reduced to the roles of supplements. Emilia addresses them as “the calendars of [her sons’] nativity” (5.1.406), thereby attributing but one major function to them: to measure the life-span of the other two. Like in Twelfth Night, there is no embrace, either because the sight of the embracing twins would remind the contemporary viewer of “the monstrous conjoined twin,” or because keeping them apart helps the characters assert their individuality (Murray 2017, 174). Twin farce often tries to soften these blows to the ego by playing its last lines solely for laughs or sentiment. Cooney’s climactic family reunion is supplemented by the last-minute appearance of yet another brother from France, and most post-Shakespearean twin plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries culminate in multiple marriage announcements and all-around joviality. Underneath the display of cheerfulness, however, we can glimpse a fundamental crisis of identity, triggered by the characters’ growing awareness of their interchangeability. Soon after the appearance of their doppelgangers, the two Antipholi and the Dromios hardly recognise themselves: “Do you know me, sir?” asks a distraught Dromio of Syracuse. “Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?” (3.2.74–75) By implication, the appearance of twins doubles the potential for laughter and that for pain and loss (Gay 2008, 19), and Twelfth Night’s

62  Confusing Twins sobering conclusion supports this most strongly. The play downright refuses to deliver a festive climax of recognition, merriment, and jubilance, thus resembling the ‘Problem Plays,’ which have a tendency to reject clear-cut resolutions.8 This aspect is highlighted even more when we turn to twin farce’s subtexts, where the uncanny overlaps with nightmarish fantasies about the twins’ origins and the spectre of the demonic.

Demonic Twinship The fear of demonic laugher, of losing control over one’s body and mind through diabolical acts of mirth, is one of the most frequently voiced items of criticism levelled at farce. John Dryden warns his readers of “monstrous” entertainment brought about by the presentation of “unnatural events” and “imperfections” (1668/1970, 203); John Dennis, too, derides the genre on the basis of the allegedly “Monstrous Extravagance” by which it “infect[s]” its audience (1695/1939, 385). Give in to the genre’s embrace of the libidinal and the mean-spirited laughing-at and you are halfway to damnation, and in hell, according to Terry Eagleton, we do not hear “the chuckling of high comedy,” but “the bellowing of low farce” (2010, 78). Authors who polemicise against farce usually agree that the laughter it provokes must be “carefully monitored and evaluated” (Holland 2000, 112), and this threat of supervision (and the controlling eye of the censor) often meant that a genre that was accused of unnaturally distorting the bodies and minds of its players and audience members literally distorted itself with unlikely last-minute conversions towards decency and sentiment. As a result, plays that were suspiciously scrutinised as “black farce[s]” by their contemporaries, such as Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals (Myers 1995, xiv), resort to last-minute spiritual elevations and utterly conventional marriage and conversion plots, in order to make amends for the devilry that has been going on. Farquhar may well be mocking his censors by ‘overcompensating’ when he bestows poetic justice on the final pages of a play that, up to this point, has been thoroughly revelling in the amoral behaviour of its rogues and knaves. As Hermes Wou’dbe voices his hope that “all parties have received their due rewards and punishments” (Farquhar 1702/1795, 115), it sounds almost as though he were breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the censor, who may or may not buy into Richmore’s last-minute repentance: a character who has cruelly dumped his pregnant lover is made to see the error of his ways and agrees to marry her after all. Rider’s The Twins bestows a similarly implausible last-minute conversion and repentance upon its Iago-like villain, Lurco (“O unexpected mercy! my heart weeps for my sins”, 48), and the final tableau of Derrick’s Twins integrates O’Haversack, the impostor who has been trying to con the Professor before swearing to renounce his wicked ways. In order to allow O’Haversack

Confusing Twins  63 a fresh start, Spinach gives him a little donation from his Hindoo fund, “as I look on you as being quite as black as any Hindoo” (Derrick 1884/1910, 48). The villains in these plays are thus associated with the pagan souls who are yet to undergo conversion, which puts them in a kind of secret alliance with the twins themselves. In The Comedy of Errors, the mood is set accordingly, starting with Ephesus as the choice of setting. While Shakespeare retains Syracuse as the family’s place of origin from Plautus’s source text, he does not set his play in Epidamnus, the “prostitutish place” in Menaechmi (Plautus 1996, v. 553). Shakespeare thus ensures his audience have sorcerers and witches on their mind, and if they do not, Antipholus of Syracuse is quick to remind them at his first entry: They say this town is full of cozenage, As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, Soul-killing witches that deform the body. (1.2.97–100) Where Plautus adds jugglers and a touch of comic madness to spice up his play, Shakespeare employs black magic as a leitmotif. Critics of The Comedy of Errors are quick to remind us that this must be taken with a pinch of salt: Shakespeare neither presents actual demons nor does he scare the wits out of his audience, opting for a “secularizing project” that signals the dawn of the age of Enlightenment (McConnell 2012, 37). The stage apparatus of Errors certainly does not produce any actual ghosts or demons, and the fact that the characters articulate more and more superstitions throughout the play heightens the comic effect. This guarantees that the happy dénouement provides maximum relief, as all fears are revealed to be founded upon superstition, and the whole comic structure can rest on the certainty that there is no supernatural agency involved. Evidently, the play mixes “very different witchcraft discourses,” including classical, Christian and shamanistic traditions, all “jumbled together in a vision of dangerous, sinful urban liberties” (Greenblatt 1994, 27–28). Not everyone subscribed to the idea that witches were real, yet the existence of pamphlets and reports of witch-trials certainly suggest that the topic was open to contestation. It is through the individual characters’ panicked reactions that the play manages to criticise not just “those who idolatrously usurp divine authority, but also those who assign supernatural causes to mysterious phenomena” (McConnell 2012, 36). Shakespeare’s epigones are similarly eclectic in their choice of allusions: in Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals alone, the appearance of doppelgangers leads to the invoking of uncanny revenants, witches, and “ghosts and apparitions” (107).

64  Confusing Twins However, if one opts for a completely rationalist, material reading of twin farce, foregoing any in-depth engagement with its diabolical subtexts, one inevitably glosses over the more pertinent shades of the uncanny and the complexity of their ‘twin troubles.’ Structural aspects alone cannot fully explain why conjurers and exorcists permeate the twin plays and why they share with Hamlet (1601) and Macbeth (1606) not only the suspected presence of angry spirits, but a link between vengeful ghosts and genealogical trouble. In both the comedies and the tragedies, the characters run the risk of losing their mental sanity under these burdens: Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors are the two Shakespeare plays that contain the most references to madness after Hamlet (Whitworth 2008, 53). Sebastian notes he must be either “mad, or else this is a dream” (4.1.60) when a complete stranger challenges him to a duel, and when Olivia, whom he has never seen before, asks for his hand in marriage, he observes how his soul “disputes well with my sense/That this may be some error, but no madness” (4.3.9–10). When the soul is at war with the senses, the epistemic dimension of the dénouement is easy to see. Remember the repetitive refrain of Derrick’s final scene (“I see it all”) or the sheer horror that befalls Antipholus of Ephesus when he cannot grasp what is going on and is diagnosed with mental illness. Ironically, the cure that Dr. Pinch prescribes for him and Dromio can only worsen their condition, as they are locked up “in some dark room” (4.4.95) without the ability to see anything. Shakespeare thus prefigures Foucault’s critical take on the notion of confinement, which signalled the “homogenisation of the insane” (Foucault 1961/2008, 113). The threat of pathologisation remains present in the genre; in her Shakespeare rewrite, Oh, I Do Like to Be … (2019), Marie Phillips has the characters think of multiple-personality disorder and early-onset Alzheimer’s to account for the strange behaviour of Bill(y), the novel’s twin protagonists (Phillips 2019, 95–96). But twin farce suggests that the respective diagnosis and treatment can only naturalise so much of the erratic behaviour, as the frequently voiced idea that everyone may have gone mad gradually gives way to suspicions of satanic interference. References to demons and witchcraft permeate twin farce; they accumulate as the complications pile up, driven by a rhetoric of amplification that is itself opposed to restraint – and thus provide their own equivalent to the (stage-)‘magic.’ The association is certainly not far-fetched: Stephen Greenblatt notes that Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most explicitly demonic play, invokes all the contemporary stereotypes attributed to witches and raises them to a meta-theatrical level, thereby acknowledging “that the theater and witchcraft are both constructed on the boundary between fantasy and reality” (1994, 32). In Errors, it is initially only up to the two Dromios – coded as dim-witted, superstitious ­creatures – to articulate fears of fantastic beasts and soul-sucking witches; however, their masters soon chime in and begin to lose their certainty as to

Confusing Twins  65 whether they are “in earth, in heaven, or in hell?/Sleeping or waking? Mad or well advised?” (2.2.215–216). Twelfth Night, too, toys with the presence of demonic elements and with references to the devil: not particularly surprising given the festive nature of the play’s original performance context (Hunt 2011, 13). To begin with, though, most of these references are not aimed at the twins, but at Malvolio, whom Sir Toby and his vicious mates gradually drive towards insanity, culminating in Feste’s cry: “Fie, thou dishonest Satan!” (4.2.31) However, the presence of the demonic is not limited to the group’s humiliation of the deluded Puritan – and he is certainly not the one who is most consistently associated with that motif. This honour belongs to fiendish women, on the one hand, and to the twins, on the other, with both groups overlapping in the figure of Viola. This gendered discourse is, of course, an extension of the contemporary witch discourse, an intertextual dialogue not limited to these Shakespeare plays. Cases like the 1602 Glover/Jackson trial lay heavily on the minds of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans: when the physician Edward Jorden explained Mary Glover’s alleged possession by way of her menarche (“the dominant, conventional explanation for female malady”, Peterson 2004, 7), he was merely echoing positions that were more or less explicitly formulated in Shakespearean drama, too. The characters are as much troubled by female sexuality as they are by the uncanny multiplication of selves around them. It is not just malicious spirits but transgressive women against whose corrupting influences the characters seek to protect themselves. In The Comedy of Errors, this starts with the courtesan (“Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!” 4.3.48), but Antipholus of Ephesus will soon call his own wife a “sorceress” and “witch” who is in cahoots “with a damnèd pack” (4.3.66–103). The generalisation is certainly never far off: if the courtesan is “a sorceress,” then “you are all” (4.3.66), and when Dromio of Syracuse inquires whether the unknown intruder on the other side of the gate (not knowing that it is his twin brother) “conjure[s] for wenches” with his cursing (3.1.34), the implication is that women can be summoned by way of magic spells. The Twin Rivals extends the analogy to the scheming character of Midwife Midnight, “a necessary devil” for her fellow conspirators and the most cunning character in the play (Farquhar 1702/1795, 27). Even more than women, however, it is the twins who are associated with evil spirits. Michael, one of the Hickory Wood brothers in One for the Pot, introduces himself as a “[p]art-time conjuror” (Cooney/Hilton 1963/1990, 83), while Timothy Spinach, when drunk, has “a diabolical odour of whisky about him” (Derrick 1884/1910, 45). In Errors, Egeon is the only one to insist upon the benign nature of his “two goodly sons” (1.1.50), and the demonic subtext soon provokes the appearance of the laughable goon Dr. Pinch, who is authorised to exorcise the Anti-­ Christ from Antipholus of Ephesus: “I charge thee, Satan, housed within

66  Confusing Twins this man,/To yield possession to my holy prayers” (4.4.55–56). Twelfth Night makes a similar point: when Orsino sends Viola on her first errand, Olivia demands to know who is at the gate, to which Toby replies that he does not care, though “[it] be the devil” (1.5.129). This casual remark proves to be prophetic, for Olivia is about to be smitten with the androgynous beauty of Cesario/Viola, and when s/he rejects her, Olivia suspects that her presumed Hermes may, in fact, be a Lucifer: “A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell” (3.4.219). Antonio, whose homoerotic interest in Sebastian continues to inspire queer readings of Twelfth Night,9 betrays the same diction. He fears that the young man may be too fair to be true, as all that is beauteous may hide evil that is “o’er-flourish’d by the devil” (3.4.379); when asked what propelled him to head for the shore of his enemies, Antonio can only say that “[a]  witchcraft drew me hither” (5.1.74). By the same token, Sir Toby scares Sir Andrew with reports of Cesario’s alleged fencing-skills (“he’s a very devil”, 3.4.278), and Andrew subsequently confirms that “he’s the very devil incardinate” (5.1.179–180). Later, Viola will suspect that Sebastian is a miraculous spirit who has taken “both form and suit,” which he cannot totally deny: A spirit I am indeed, But am in that dimension grossly clad Which from the womb I did participate. (5.1.233–235) Critics who have picked up on the motif tend not to invoke Sebastian’s and Viola’s status as twin siblings to make sense of it. Maurice Hunt (2011, 11–12) explains it by way of the gender masquerade; after all, the devil is an elusive transvestite himself, who frequently dons costumes and changes his shape as he pleases. Yet the presence of the twin figure is no less likely to motivate the demonic rhetoric throughout the play. If the twin is the embodiment of the ‘naturalised’ (yet, as we saw, undeniably ‘other’ and monstrous) doppelganger or personified multiplication, it is useful to remember that all magic is ultimately about duplicity and duplication – Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige (1995), a twin tale set amongst magicians, is based on this very premise. As we have seen, trickery of the ‘now you see him, now you don’t’ variety relies on a fixed repertory of stage tropes that reduces the characters to embodied puns and to materialised spells. It is an extension of the twin logic that also motivates the “choric juxtapositions” that recur throughout Errors, the exit of one twin being immediately followed by the entry of the other (Williams 2005, 47). Frequently, the characters’ fatalistic prophecies come true, which stresses “the magical and amplifying power of the verbal” (Cartwright 2009, 138). Evidently, this is a world driven by farcical logic, where performative speech acts abound.

Confusing Twins  67 Antipholus of Syracuse voices his resolution to “stop mine ears against the mermaid’s song” (4.1.169) just when the goldsmith’s call provokes him to respond in name and thereby contradict his own claim; a little later, when he is at his wits’ end, Antipholus calls for some “blessèd power [to] deliver us from hence” (4.3.44), an invocation which is immediately followed by the entry of the courtesan. What is uttered becomes material by virtue of repetition, yet the echoing effect of the twins’ dual appearance also shows “how temporal and spatial changes reconfigure meaning”, for the echo always “alters signification through repetition” (Mallin 1995, 211). As is true for so much of the farcical structure per se, we can easily detect the supplementary logic of deconstructivist philosophy at work here, since the twin narrative illustrates a key Derridean proposition: that “the idea of the original is created by the copies” whose existence is simultaneously interpreted as a threat (Culler 2011, 12). In Twelfth Night, it is Feste who exposes these paradoxes with his witty attack on learned rhetoric, teaching us that “[n]othing that is so, is so” (4.1.8–9), and he returns to the figure of tautology throughout the play, propagating Derridean différance when he uses similes that are not similar at all (4.2.37–40). With the quasi-deconstructivist rhetoric going over their heads, characters like the Dromios resort to the corporeal in their search for reliable, stable signifiers. Consequently, beatings are soon the only hard currency between masters and servants, and the only unambiguous form of communication, though neither of the Dromios correctly identifies his master’s ‘handwriting’ when the blows are struck (3.1.13–14). The characters’ superstitions may be revealed to be unfounded in the end, yet it would be short-sighted to conclude that twin farce establishes a safe haven “of material causes and ends” (McConnell 2012, 39), not least because the festive, celebratory spirit of the ending cannot dispel all the fears aroused by the appearance of the twins. Though twin farce tries hard to deliver a sense of a successful, collectively performed exorcism, the climactic materialisation of the twin brothers in direct juxtaposition with each other cannot completely banish the devilry that has been going on – not least due to its anti-climactic nature, as we have seen. The reappearance of his father is reason enough for Antipholus to suspect supernatural forces at work (“Egeon, art thou not? Or else his ghost”, 5.1.338), and the Duke of Ephesus, on seeing the brothers, asks, “which is the natural man,/And which the spirit?” (5.1.333–335). Read in this vein, Viola’s self-pitying aside to herself in the second Act (“I, poor monster”, 2.2.33) has echoes of Frankenstein, not least because the immense difficulties in retaining control over the unruly female body are frequently articulated as horrific birth fantasies with troubling dynastic implications in twin narratives. Daisy Murray certainly has a point when she argues that there is a split between Renaissance tragedy and comedy in that the former tends to emphasise “the monstrous potential” and

68  Confusing Twins “the sexual deviance” of the twin, whereas the latter celebrates twinship “as a blessing and sign of God’s pleasure” (Murray 2017, 24–25), but at the same time, the comedies are full of ambiguity and the tragedies rife with black humour. Many of the underlying fears regarding ‘monstrous births’ populate not just the Renaissance stage, but also cotemporary medical texts.

Dynastic Troubles, Monstrous Births If the existence of twins is frequently mythologised by way of divine interference, suspicions of devilish involvement are never far off. Evidently, divinities never show themselves from their most chaste or virtuous side when ravishing young women, who then give birth to semi-divine twins. Part of the blame is placed upon the prospective mother, who is scolded for ‘allowing herself’ to be seduced or raped, but also upon the midwife. She is the first to perform the binary operation of segmenting the elder from the younger and the ‘original’ from its ‘copy’, a semantic cutting-up process that finds its equivalent in the cutting of the navel-string. Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals actually features a midwife amongst its dramatis personae, and she proves herself true to her reputation as a ‘witch’ throughout the play, maliciously scheming her way towards profit. At a time when the professional category of midwifery was thoroughly re-negotiated (see Gélis 1991, 107–111), Farquhar’s Midwife Midnight embodies many of the older, less flattering stereotypes surrounding these women. She meddles wherever she can and derives pleasure from giving Jewish babies into the hands of Christian families, she mocks pregnant Clelia with the vicious pun that her misfortunes are so big “that they are not to be borne” (Farquhar 1702/1795, 24), and gossips about Lady Stillborn [sic], whose promiscuity makes it hard for her to pinpoint her delivery date. In cahoots with Young Wou’dbe, she proves the source of much chagrin and at various times revises her account of who is, in fact, the older twin, thus changing sides while the two brothers struggle to gain the upper hand. Having eventually been brought down by his virtuous brother and his bride, Young Wou’dbe remarks that it is unholy alliances with women that are instrumental in a man’s downfall: “the devil was immediately on her side” (112). The meddling midwife is one symptom of the general anxiety that surrounds the dubious birth of the twins: an anxiety which takes different forms throughout literary history and across a variety of genres, but which has a common point of origin in the formation of professional medicine and gynaecology in the early modern period. The Renaissance arguably (re)invented twins and the idea of (non-)natural birth, as attitudes towards women began to shift and patriarchal medicine found itself struggling to retain control over a maternal body that was about to develop a more favourable image as nourishing and hospitable.10

Confusing Twins  69 The process of how “women’s bodies came to bear social meanings as well as babies” (Fissell 2006, 244) can be traced via the midwife manual, a popular text-type of the era that provides many examples of how the womb is subjected to fierce ideological battles (see Schwanebeck 2016). According to a belief inherited from the Ancients and still widely shared throughout the Renaissance, a natural and perfect conception occurs when the seed of both sexes is good, and duly prepared and cast into the womb as into fruitful ground, and is there so fitly and equally mingled, the Man’s seed with the womans [sic], that a perfect Child is by degrees framed. (Sharp 1671, 92) However, should one of these contributing factors be imperfect, the unborn child must bear the consequences. According to Aristotle, twins result from a surplus of matter, and he immediately aligns them with “monstrosities, because their formation is contrary to the general rule and to what is usual” (Aristotle 1943, 439). Images of deformed or multi-limbed children are frequently included in treatises aimed at midwives and young mothers, and the outrageous, almost surreal imagery adds a touch of sensationalism that the publishers certainly appreciated. Frequently, the imagination runs wild when it comes to descriptions of ‘monstrous children’ (Fig. 3.1). In her study of Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (2005), Julie Crawford demonstrates how the monstrously deformed

Fig. 3.1  M  onstrous children (Anon. 1684/1700, n.p. and 182).

70  Confusing Twins child is bound up with the idea of a foreign contaminant entering the English body politic, particularly with the idea of Catholic threats to ‘healthy’ English Protestantism. The resulting drawings betray the same anthropological curiosity that also propelled various pictures of the ‘New World’ circulating in Europe at that time: drawings based on other people’s drawings or oral testimony. The gallery of ‘imperfect children’ assembled in these texts contains hermaphrodites, big-headed and hydropical children, creatures with two faces and four arms, maimed children as well as black, furry, or animal-­faced ones, not to mention borderline mythical creatures, such as children with hooked noses, tails, and elephant trunks. Contemporary medical discourse propagated the idea that “a Woman may conceive by the Seed of a Beast, because it is by Nature fruitful, but thereof will be a Monster born, not a Man” (Culpeper 1651/1668, 98). Andrew Boorde, in his Breviarie of Health, stresses that “any copulacion [sic]” which is “had with unlike” engenders “a monstrous thing” (1547/1575, 32), and if he does not directly implicate women here, this is only because he does not have to. Patriarchal (medical) consciousness seems only afflicted by the unholy alliance of beasts and women, with the welcome side-effect of letting men, especially doctors, completely off the hook. Admittedly, the idea of women copulating with beasts and devils was an outlandish one even during the Shakespearean age, although the devil’s ability to impregnate women was still part of popular folklore (Hunt 2011, 10) and one of the reasons why ‘devil’ was a widely known synonym for ‘penis.’ This narrative of beastly sexuality was uncomfortably close to the idea of sexually voracious women. Nicholas Culpeper, whose Directory for Midwives was one of the most successful midwife manuals of the seventeenth century, discusses it in the same breath as the subject of women who are sexually active during menstruation (1651/1668, 98) – women who, from the patriarchal point of view, reject the exclusively reproductive functionalisation of their sexuality. The patriarchal voice of authority reacts by attributing abject qualities to the female body, thus relegating it to a baser state of being. Culpeper, in a proto-Freudian spirit of confusing the vagina with the anal ‘cesspit,’11 is one of many contemporaries to voice his disgust at the idea of man being “conceived between the places ordained to cast out excrements, the very sinks of the Body, and in such a manner that his Mother was ashamed to tell him how” (ibid. 22). To this contamination in physique, which will resonate strongly with the ‘abject’ nature of the twin, is added one that derives from the spirit and the imagination. According to a widely held belief that had gained in momentum throughout the Middle Ages, the parents’ behaviour has immediate consequences for the unborn child’s well-­ being, particularly the mother’s imagination. This idea circulated as folk wisdom, but was also adopted throughout the medical profession, as

Confusing Twins  71 the mother’s thoughts and “unsatisfied desires” were believed to cause birthmarks and hare-lips (Huet 1993, 18). The most fervent followers of the school of imaginationism went even further than that, arguing that women must not allow their imagination to wander astray during the act of conceiving children so as not to risk defective births and abnormal children: “the imagination hath a power to imprint on the body of the Infant, marks of this nature,” especially “when young with Child, and principally at the very moment of conception” (Mauriceau 1673, 15). Remnants of this folk-belief can still be traced in the nineteenth century and to the literature of Romanticism: in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella, Die Doppeltgänger (The Doubles, 1821), a woman’s obsession with the man she cannot have leads to her desire imprinting the man’s features on her own unborn child. Not only does the discourse surrounding the maternal imagination fuse with the debate on ‘devilish’ impregnation, it also clings to pseudo-Aristotelian remnants of ancient wisdom, with the apocryphal Aristotle’s Masterpiece suggesting that intercourse is all about a ‘battle of the seeds,’ a fight for whether the paternal or the maternal matter will leave the stronger imprint upon the child. Monstrous births are blamed upon “disorder of the maternal imagination” (Huet 1993, 1), a force that grows so powerful in some midwife manuals that the most “extreamly [sic] Lascivious” amongst women are deemed capable of forcing children into the world without involving a partner, by sheer “force of Imagination” (Anon. 1684/1700, 46). This dubious line of argument seeks to keep a lid on female desire, and the midwife manuals frequently read like anthologies of cautionary tales about children born out of wedlock. The fact that Anne Boleyn had given birth to a deformed foetus was widely taken as proof that she must have committed adultery (Wilson 1993, 171), while disabled children allegedly “slander[ed] the womb that bore [them],” their otherness serving as “evidence of the mother’s sin” (Greer 2007, 196). While twins are not directly implicated as ‘monstrous births,’ they invariably appear in the chapters dedicated to deformed or four-limbed children or are located close to them, and the “taxonomic proximity between twin births and physical mutation and pathology” situates them “in the realm of sickness and physical dysfunction” (Viney 2013). William Smellie may propose that two “distinct” children must be called twins, whereas “monsters” are the ones who are “joined together” (1752/1876, 117), yet they are rarely as neatly divided in the Renaissance literature. After all, the well-known definition of the monstrous that Ambroise Paré puts forward in his seminal work, De monstres et prodigies, could easily be extended to the twin phenomenon in Renaissance times. Monsters, according to Paré, “are things that appear outside the course of Nature (and are usually signs of some forthcoming misfortune)” (1573/1982, 3), and both of these characteristics apply to twins, who come to be categorised as an unnatural phenomenon. Twelfth Night

72  Confusing Twins features a typically Shakespearean pun on the idea of optical allusion when Count Orsino, seeing Viola and Sebastian together for the first time, remarks: “[a] natural perspective, that is, and is not!” (5.1.215) Contemporary midwife manuals regularly list twins as ‘unnatural births’ (see Raynald 1540/1634, 89–90 and Willughby 1670/1863, 335–339), a category that contains foetuses in complicated positions, stillborn children, as well as children that fall outside the category of the natural in the sense that they are not born “in due season, and also in due fashion” (Raynald 1540/1634, 90). They were (and, it should be added, still are) associated with higher risks than regular pregnancies: the death of Shakespeare’s own twin son, Hamnet, at the age of eleven has been blamed on long-term consequences resulting from his difficult birth; Germaine Greer (2007, 195–196) goes so far as to speculate that Shakespeare’s son may have been disabled. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that Philip Barrough is not the only medical authority to include twins in his list of problematic births (1583/1601, 204). In other cases, this aligning of twins with the realm of the unnatural happens in a more implicit manner. Percy Willughby, a male midwife whose Observations in Midwifery were eventually published in the Victorian age, does not include twins in his list of difficult births (1670/1863, 51–53), but there are plenty of twin deliveries amongst his case histories that do not end well. Usually, at least one of the children dies; to see both live amounts to a miracle. Nowhere does the medical literature of the time betray any of the rhetoric that we associate with twin births in our day and age, which is so taken with the purely rosetinted view of twins as double blessings. On the contrary, Culpeper’s Directory (a sequel to Culpeper’s successful book but not actually authored by him) lists the phenomenon of twin conceptions under the descriptive heading of a woman “conceiv[ing] too many” (Anon. 1651/1676, 131). In the context of the midwife manual, ‘too many’ can connote a challenging situation for the midwife and a potentially dangerous one for the mother. Patient Grissill (1600), a stage adaptation of the Griselda myth authored by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton, turns Griselda’s two children into a pair of “two beauteous twins” (3.2.160) so as to add to the protagonist’s hardship, while Farquhar, in his stage debut Love and a Bottle (1699), has the scoundrel Roebuck flee from Ireland where he has impregnated a woman with twins: [It] was double Fornication, Ned – The Jade was so pregnant to bear Twins, the Fruit grew in Clusters; and my unconscionable Father, because I was a Rogue in debauching her, wou’d make me a Fool by wedding her […]. Heavn’n was pleas’d to lessen my Affliction, by taking away the She-brat; but the other is, I hope, well. (Farquhar 1699/1760, 14–15)

Confusing Twins  73 What the outrageously cynical Roebuck shows gratitude for has troubling implications. Within the dynastic logic that both twin farce and the midwife manual partake in, the death of the female twin is a twofold act of divine mercy. Not only does it alleviate some of the family’s economic strain, it also hints at Roebuck’s patriarchal conviction that sons are better than daughters.12 Moreover, twin births were more likely to involve complications than a regular birth, and they required the presence of a skilled midwife. Francis Mauriceau and other medical experts of the time remind their readers that nature is not “orderly in causing one to be born before the other” (1673, 251), and the readers are frequently provided with detailed instructions on how to safely deliver both children. The texts even provide imagery for the different ways in which the children may be positioned within the womb and the possible complications that can follow from this, as I have indicated in Chapter 2. But again, this alone cannot account for the association with the realm of the ‘unnatural,’ for the regular position is frequently included under the same heading, which implies that the occurrence of twins alone must account for a degree of ‘unnaturalness.’ Few of the contemporary sources discuss the conception of twins with definitive authority. The more practically minded treatises list typical symptoms of twin pregnancies, including the extraordinary swelling of the belly as well as limited movability, but the underlying reasons for twin pregnancies remain shrouded in mystery. Some authors claim that a woman may have a natural disposition towards multiple pregnancies. Jane Sharp, viewed by many as a proto-feminist voice of the Renaissance yet just as indebted to ancient male authorities as the rest of the competition, draws upon Empedocles or Ptolemy, who speculate that twins may be either caused by the amount of seed or by the constellation of the stars, respectively (1671, 70). Such musings on the excessive and unnatural suggest that the Renaissance idea of twin births veers dangerously close to the realm of the monstrous. Typically, fears and anxieties associated with male authority, the continuity of the bloodline, and illegitimate children are negotiated around an anomaly, one that potentially challenges the established patriarchal hierarchy, the system of reproduction and its accepted form of organisation: heterosexual marriage. The figure of the twin is a threat to this system, for it exceeds the Renaissance realm of the knowable – a ‘dangerous birth,’ then, not just for the woman carrying two children who may be positioned ‘unnaturally’ inside the womb, but also for the male professionals and gate-keepers of medical knowledge who surround her. Throughout the seventeenth century, the childbed is posited as “the threshold of male science,” where “doctor and midwife [struggle] for authority,” not only over delivery, but over the “control of fertility” (Wilson 1993, 164). It is over the “open interpretative space” of the reproductive

74  Confusing Twins body (Fissell 2006, 1) that midwives clash with their male colleagues or with medical authorities, and a bleak comedy like Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals is but one of many contemporary sources that indicate why. The power of the midwife “to directly and tangibly corrupt families’ heirs, and through those heirs the future of English masculinity” must be a troubling prospect for the patriarchal powers, and one that “cannot be shut down within the comic structures of the play[s]” (Savage 2008, 482). The patriarchal conquest of the delivery room (which, according to Foucault, goes along with the birth of the clinic) will be completed in the eighteenth century, when science finds a way to access the childbed and to get rid of the mother altogether. The laboratory is established as “the modern womb,” where the scientist himself takes the mother’s as well as the midwife’s place (Huet 1993, 110–111). The medical establishment’s various attempts to charter the childbed and, at the same time, to medicalise the womb betray anxieties that are reflected in the literary works of the era, most notably in Shakespeare’s twin plays and his tragedy Titus Andronicus (1594), which is structured around the horror of the female womb (see Wynne-Davies 1998). By the 1630s, the discourse on gynaecological illnesses has firmly established itself in England and on the continent, subjecting women to patriarchal control by way of a professionalised gaze directed at “the female body and its punishing trials and tribulations” (Cressy 2002, 15). At the same time, the midwife manual constantly reveals the limits of that gaze, as the authoritative voices articulated in these texts must grudgingly admit that they neither know “whether a woman bears two Children, though she be in Labour” (Sermon 1671, 132–133), nor how many children a woman is capable of giving birth to. It may be easy to exorcise fears of devilish influences and to convince their readers as well as themselves that the idea of the devil engaging in intercourse with young women amounts to nothing but mad whimsy, but how are they to account for twins, who make the medical elite look as dumbfounded as the Shakespearean protagonists who are completely taken aback by the sight of their doubles – doubles that challenge crucial assumptions about man’s place in the universe? When Sebastian perceives Cesario in Twelfth Night, he denies the existence of an identical twin brother, for there cannot be “that deity in my nature/Of here and everywhere” (5.1.225–226). Ubiquity is God’s exclusive domain, whereas singularity is man’s prerogative – a proposition challenged when there is but “[o]ne face, one voice, one habit, and two persons” (5.1.214). However, in spite of the epistemological uncertainty, the risks associated with multiple pregnancies, the economic pressures, and destitution experienced by families suddenly ‘blessed’ with multiple children, it is hard to account for the overall degree of reservation and borderline panic that Renaissance medical discourse betrays in its treatment of twins. Associations with transgressive sexuality and especially the realm

Confusing Twins  75 of the supernatural – witchcraft, curses, and demons – are never far off in both fictional and non-fictional Renaissance accounts of the twin phenomenon. Farce, while enjoying a dubious reputation as the least troublesome and substantial of all comedic forms, proves a fertile ground for a literary exorcism directed against the notion of the demonic. Here, the uncanny is attached to the twin motif, which allows for “the demarcations between the improbable and the impossible [to] become very ghostly” (Bloom 1998, 23) and which sets up convoluted marriage plots to negotiate the dynastic complications that arise from twin births.

Reunion and Reproduction Farcical endings not only restore sanity after temporary anarchy, but they also exorcise fears regarding the future of the state by repairing its smallest unit: the family. In order to facilitate this, Shakespeare’s twin plays happily accept their ‘intruders’ into the bosom of the body politic. Viola may abandon her gender masquerade, yet she and Sebastian settle down permanently in Illyria to marry the region’s wealthiest inhabitants, and Antipholus of Syracuse catches up with his brother’s Ephesian family. While there is no geographical displacement that needs to be rectified at the end of either play, there are different forms of adaptation that the characters must enact. They cease to wander around and settle down, accepting their part in the heterosexual system of marriage and reproduction. The endings emphasise conventional bonds of kinship, an idea supported by the full family reunion that The Comedy of Errors proposes. Following “this unjust divorce of us” when their ship was destroyed in a storm (1.1.102), the dénouement brings the family together again. Egeon returns just in time, and the rope that Dromio of Ephesus carries around will not remain the sole reminder of umbilical cords, as the scene also resurrects the twins’ mother, Egeon’s wife “[t]hat bore [him] at a burden two fair sons” (5.1.344). While Shakespeare undercuts the festive spirit somewhat by having several characters refuse to partake in the celebration (a perceived ‘flaw’ of the plays that several of its adaptations later attempt to rectify), twin farce frequently opts for the climactic tableau of the ‘group hug’ and neat closure of the courtship plot. As Poole reasons in his introduction to The Hole in the Wall, “a farce ought to end in marriage – for beyond it there’s no joke” (1813, vi). At the end of One for the Pot, Hardcastle grudgingly delivers on his promise to look after his old business partner’s offspring and hands out the promised 10,000 pounds not to one, but to four Hickory Wood brothers (Cooney/Hilton 1963/1990, 125), and the play makes it abundantly clear that this money will provide a badly needed infusion to the ailing family enterprise and lead to more offspring. The blackmailing butler whom Charlie accuses of forcing “blood money” out of him may insist that he “need[s] the transfusion”

76  Confusing Twins (21), but he is not the only one. Hardcastle himself, a wheelchair-bound invalid, parasitically feeds on his own daughter, trying to force her into a marriage of convenience in order to produce grandchildren. If capital is the required lubricant to bring about economic growth, the plays are rather unambiguous about how this growth is facilitated in the realm of conjugal relations. Lewd allusions to imminent intercourse abound during the climactic scenes, and as sex is forever postponed in these plays, particularly in bedroom farce, the plays accumulate a giant sperm build-up that the characters can hardly wait to dispose of as soon as the curtain comes down. The Hole in the Wall is indicative of that: with all the twin business settled and six out of eight players in the dramatis personae married off to each other, Old Stubborn demands that the secret passageway between the two houses is sealed, yet Fanny rejects his proposal: “I trust [that our friends] will allow the Hole in the Wall to continue” (42), which works both as a meta-commentary directed at the audience, whose turnout will grant the play a long run, and as a double entendre levelled at her friends on stage. In Rider’s The Twins, Julietta and Clarinda are constantly reminded “to shake this Maiden modesty off,/And clasp a bedfellow” (Rider 1640/1655, 3), and the play is brimming with allusions to hymens and to the economic dimension of successful unions in marriage beds. Clarinda refers to the imminent day of her deflowering as “pay-day,” and she voices her intent to get married only “when the bond bears date” (ibid. 3). It amounts to the most straightforward arithmetic formula of twin biopolitics, in that two unions are likely to prove more ‘fruitful’ than one, not to mention that twins themselves are likely to pass on the ‘twin gene’ to their own children. Early twentieth-century scientists were to build upon this eugenic programme, as were the dystopian clone narratives which I will discuss in Chapter 6. This biopolitical agenda frequently boils down to reproductive optimism, as twins are expected to procreate with exponential growth. Shakespeare’s plays, however, are somewhat more reserved in that respect, denying the audience the certainty of subsequent child-bearing. It has been suggested that Twelfth Night’s gender-bending Viola is a literary take on a biological phenomenon that has been observed in the animal kingdom: the freemartin calf, a female cow that has exchanged chromosomes with its male twin in utero and therefore remains infertile (Walsh/Pool 1940, 174). It is no coincidence that animal associations are never far off when it comes to twinned reproduction. In Two Much, the theme of continuing bloodlines is accompanied by the motif of horse-breeding, with Art Dodge instructing a party crowd with an almost Shakespearean exhibition of word-play that it is not so much “racing [that] does improve the breed”, but that “breeding improve[s] the race” (Westlake 1975, 17). Throughout the book and its numerous erotic escapades, it is Art himself who emerges as the desired race-horse

Confusing Twins  77 courted by the two mares of the Kerner household, with the symmetry of the arrangement (twin sisters courting twin brothers) hinting at a desire to keep things in the family. This borderline incestuous subtext lends itself naturally to the dynastic politics of many twin farces, or non-­farcical twin plays, for that matter – most notably John Webster’s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (1614), where the nameless Duchess’s twin brother struggles to keep a lid on his desire for his sister, the “lusty widow” (1.2.255).13 When Ferdinand remarks that it was “my blood” that “ran pure” inside “[t]hat body of hers” (4.1.118–119), he seems to think of them as one, which makes his order to have her strangled a somewhat suicidal gesture and as paradoxical as the contradictory demands he inflicts upon her: on the one hand, the Duchess’s brothers are convinced of her rottenness and fantasise about how the “notorious strumpet” (2.5.4) might infect “the royal blood of Aragon and Castile” (2.5.22); on the other hand, they count on her sexuality and fecundity to produce an heir to the Malfi estate. The play itself treats the Duchess accordingly, with her pregnancies acting as the play’s only reliable measure of diegetic time having passed (Horlacher 2010, 258). Rider’s The Twins is quite similar in that respect, for it marries the unhinged bedroom farce of Westlake’s plot to the incest theme, as well as seventeenth-century chastity discourse. The action of the play is set in motion when Charmia falls in love with Fulvio, the identical twin of her husband. Charmia herself is unable to explain how she can desire a man who resembles her own husband like an impression “made upon the wax/By the same seal” (Rider 1640/1655, 6). The fact that she keeps referring to Fulvio as ‘brother’ throughout the play indicates that an affair with him would be tantamount to incest, with associations of contagion permeating the lusty wife, who refers to herself as a “hospital of sinful maladies” (34) and as a “foul spot” that stains a “white garment” (37). Once Charmia confides in Fulvio, the full degree of hypocrisy regarding female desire becomes apparent, as her brother-in-law first advises her to cheat on her husband with someone outside the family, then suggests she commits suicide, and finally offers to sleep with her so that the family peace remains intact: “Better I do it than another man” (8). He maintains this line of argument in a rather inspired conversation with his brother, who is outraged at Fulvio’s suggestion that there is no such thing as adultery amongst twins. The chastity debate in the middle of the play is framed by two farcical episodes that remain curiously incidental to the whole plot; dramatic non-sequiturs to bear out the incestuous, self-absorbed motif of a rabid dog chasing its own tail. At the beginning, Fulvio and Charmia keep missing each other narrowly in a series of exits and entries, leading Fulvio to remark that she seems to fly him “like a shadow” (5); and in the later scenes, it is a variation of the bed-trick that restores marital peace, as the husband swaps places with his own twin to convince Charmia she has engaged in extramarital relations.

78  Confusing Twins The significance of the bed-trick alone would warrant a distinct chapter in the context of twin studies, as the motif of “[having] sex with a partner who pretends to be someone else” (Doniger 2000, 1) recurs frequently throughout the cultural history of twinship; it is the ‘adults only’ version of the ‘kids swapping places’ scenario that has been done to death in young-adult literature and TV shows like Sister, Sister (1994– 1999), now remembered mostly for the Saturday Night Live spoofs inspired by it.14 Michael, one of the twins in One for the Pot, recalls “a devil of a mix-up” that occurred when “the O’Malley boys married the Shaunnesy twins” and got so drunk on their wedding night that “they couldn’t tell those two lovely girls apart” and are “not sure to this day if it did work out right” (Cooney/Hilton 1963/1990, 82). Wendy Doniger, in her comprehensive study of the bed-trick, discusses the motif of “one man pretend[ing] to be his twin in order to sleep with two women” (2000, 244) as a particular sub-category, and Two Much is the most comprehensive appropriation of this theme, with Art Dodge taking the joke so far as to be “cuckolding myself! […] I was both sinned against and sinning, in identical proportions” (Westlake 1975, 139–140). The more conventional case is that of the twins themselves playing the trick. In Oh, I Do Like to Be …, Bill catches his wife cheating on him with his twin and briefly contemplates joining them for a threesome (Phillips 2019, 68), while Lucio Fulci’s La pretora (My Sister-in-Law, 1976), an Italian sex farce starring 1970s ‘queen of schlock’ Edwige Fenech, sees a morally stern career woman gradually infiltrated by the permissive spirit of her twin sister, until she plays a bed-trick on her own lover to convince him he has slept with the more sexually voracious of the two (see Schwanebeck [forthcoming]). The set-up is not always played for laughs, though. David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), a modern classic of body-horror cinema, uses the bed-trick as its point of departure, as twin gynaecologists Elliot and Beverly routinely share their lovers. But from there on the film evolves into a drug-riddled, nightmarish fantasy about the corporeal dimension of twinship which ends in the brothers’ mutual destruction. Erotic thrillers of this variety – François Ozon’s L’amant double (Double Lover, 2017), based upon Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Lives of the Twins (1987), is another example – often toy with epistemic gaps that milk the bed-trick for maximum suspense, and bedroom farce shares some of these qualities. In Rider’s play, this makes for a rather subversive ending, as Charmia’s obligatory repentance is based on an act of deception, and the characters struggle to make sense of the full implications of their shenanigans. While Charmia argues that she has not really committed adultery, Gratiano accuses her of having been “incestuous with your own husband” (Rider 1640/1655, 43), with the effect that the last-minute revelation that there has been ‘much ado about nothing’ is unlikely to clear up all marital troubles. The same goes for Charmia’s closing line, “She’s honest that did think she was a

Confusing Twins  79 Whore” (48), clearly written as a response to John Ford’s scandalous incest tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1630). By the same token, conjugal and familial tensions threaten to outweigh the numeric force of coupling in other twin plays, with incestuous constellations providing particularly pertinent examples. Orton’s What the Butler Saw, which borrows its epigraph from another Jacobean revenge tragedy, takes this to grotesque extremes. One of its concluding stage directions insists that “[e]veryone embraces one another” (Orton 1969/1994, 446), yet the family reunion is undercut by the preceding revelations that Mrs. Rance was raped by her own husband years ago, that the rape resulted in the birth of twins, and that the Rances have spent the whole play trying to have sex with their own children, having failed to recognise their own son and daughter. The family greets these revelations with nothing but happiness, with renowned psychiatrist Dr. Rance particularly delighted that he will finally get around to writing a bestselling book about victims of incestuous assaults. Orton’s play, with its climactic wielding of a bronze phallus, a clear nod to Aristophanic Old Comedy, invokes some of the more uncomfortable twin myths about ‘divine’ rape, and it makes a complete mockery of the happy ending. Shakespeare, too, relies on conventions of the ancients when it comes to the climactic reunion. As a “matriarchal deus ex machina figure” (Shaughnessy 2011, 102), Emilia clears up part of the confusion and fills expository blanks for the audience. The fact that she is revealed to be the abbess of the local monastery reinforces the sacredness of the occasion. The family is reunited after 33 years of separation, which alludes to the life-span of Jesus and, by implication, to the idea of redemption and the Immaculate Conception. On stage, a portal often features in the background of the climactic confrontation, as if to acknowledge that, in order to reunite, the twins must cross the birth canal once more: Emilia suggestively asks them “to take the pains/To go with us into the abbey here” (5.1.395–396, my emphasis). Yet in spite of the biblical subtext, Shakespeare is no advocate for the Holy Family, and his use of the trope borders on comic hyperbole. He amplifies the family motif so much that it is hard to take it all very seriously. Parents are reunited with their missing children, marriages are created, and the absence of any typical Shakespearean ‘fly in the ointment’ (such as Malvolio in Twelfth Night) only increases our suspicion that it is all a little too good to be true, particularly given the shambles that went on before. Antipholus of Ephesus must pick up the pieces following a day of “deep shames and great indignities” (5.1.253), what with his business partners having seen him humiliated and his wife having caught on to his cheating. We are asked to acknowledge that family bonds, or what passes for biological instinct between the lines, absorb all the trouble. Moreover, the travesty of Immaculate Conception enacted in the final scene glosses over the complete affirmation of patriarchal bonds. Not only does the climax reunite the

80  Confusing Twins family, but it also reaffirms the central status of the two father figures. The simultaneous presence of Egeon, biological father of the twins, and Solinus as ‘father’ of the dukedom underlines that a socio-political ­disturbance – one of the wealthiest Illyrians has incurred the wrath of his business partners – must be rectified at the micro-level of the family. On the surface, Twelfth Night appears to be free from such indebtedness to the parents’ generation in order to legitimise its reunion, but this view does not hold up. The ending, while retaining some degree of ambiguity and queerness, posits the dominance of husbands over wives, as well as that of the ‘law of the father.’ The re-appearance of Sebastian not only restores society to health, it also supplements Viola’s family narrative: “Sebastian was my father;/Such a Sebastian [is] my brother too” (5.1.230–231). Much like Portia in The Merchant of Venice (1598), “a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father” (1.2.23–24), twins Viola and Sebastian gladly accept their roles as puppets in “an elaborate, fanciful instance of patriarchal ventriloquism” (Callaghan 2000, 46). With the families thus in place comes the promise of the continuity of the system – in Shakespeare’s other plays, this is evidenced most drastically by the farcical spirit of The Merchant of Venice’s final scene, where the newly married couples practically rush off-stage to fornicate and to deliver on the third-act bet about who will be the quickest in producing a son (3.2.213–214). Similarly, the twin plays give voice to the idea that family bonds must be upheld and that offspring is necessary for the bloodline to remain intact. Thus, the trope of multiplication is intimately bound up with the idea of reproduction. If things and people “divide and multiply at a prodigious, almost supernatural, rate” in Ephesus (Callaghan 2013, 102), the outcome guarantees that this ‘demonic’ spirit finds a useful implementation. Twin farce’s final tableau clearly amounts to personified virility: a scrotum ready to ejaculate its seed as soon as the curtain comes down. Dympna Callaghan stresses that “the fleshy grotesque body reigns supreme” in Twelfth Night and that the play is thoroughly obsessed with references to both female and male genitalia (2000, 35). In this respect, the subtitle (What You Will), with its well-known pun on ‘will’ as an Elizabethan synonym for ‘penis,’ is as telling as Malvolio’s failed attempt to decipher Olivia’s letter. If her handwriting really spells out “CU[N]T” and thus presents “the female body in its most biologically essential form,” as Callaghan suggests (2000, 43), then the play posits an idea that the twin plot must catch up with: help the bereaved get a grip on her period (of mourning) and have her spread her legs to receive a virile husband. Viola twice uses the word ‘pregnant’ in connection with Olivia, and while the word is usually taken to mean ‘receptive’ or ‘ready’ in these cases, Maurice Hunt (2011, 6) suggests that Shakespeare’s use of it very much prefigures our modern understanding of it. Read in this fashion, Olivia’s “most pregnant and vouchsafed ear” (3.1.91) invokes the idea of Immaculate Conception as a remedy against demonic impregnation, an

Confusing Twins  81 idea that could be extended to Malvolio’s sexual advances towards Olivia (Hunt 2011, 10–11). However, it remains unclear whether the “pregnant enemy” (2.2.27) refers to the devil or to Viola herself, who has donned the deceitful disguise. She is pregnant insofar as her phantom pain marks her out as the receptacle of her twin brother, whom she believes dead and in honour of whose memory she employs the gender masquerade, making sure that he remains “living in my glass” (3.4.390). Her actual pregnancy will have to wait until Orsino consummates their marriage. Though the subtext of the final scene is not as bawdy as that of The Merchant of Venice with its various references to the ladies’ ‘rings,’ the dynastic significance is clear enough. After all, the theme of reproduction is present throughout the play, from the moment Viola scolds Olivia for taking a vow of solitude and “leav[ing] the world no copy” (1.5.246). Shakespeare uses the same conceit time and again in his procreation sonnets, and he milks it for full effect here in order to draw a playful analogy between his biological ‘carbon copies’ and the act of reproduction. In the same breath, Olivia – a powerful, solitary female figure who is widely expected to commit to a strategic marriage to Orsino – is linked to the ‘Virgin Queen’ Elizabeth. The play thus indirectly comments both on the queen’s very strict policy on how her image was to circulate and on royal marriage politics (see Mallin 1995, 194–202). A reference to the Duke of Anjou’s unsuccessful courtship of Elizabeth two decades earlier may have been but a nostalgic joke for Shakespeare’s audience, but the idea of the monarch who wills an heir into the world without the aid of a husband adds to the play’s ongoing theme of ‘unnatural’ births. Just like the midwife manuals, which address the twin phenomenon first and foremost as a complication and a challenge to ‘natural’ forms of conception and childbirth, twin farce highlights the motif’s various uncanny connotations without distracting from the biopolitical dimension of the theme. In Discipline and Punish, his major study of the transition from sovereign power towards the modern nation-state, Foucault argues that “the body is bound up” with “its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination” (1975/1979, 25–26). Viewed from this angle, twin farce – as a genre rising to prominence in the time-span Foucault examines – can be shown to partake in a “discourse of productive labour” (Wilson 1993, 142). The ending of Errors bids a symbolic goodbye to the punitive regime of Duke Solinus, who suspends the capital punishment with which he has threatened Egeon and thus allows the family to be incorporated into functioning social and mercantile structures again.

Twinship and Kinship Few other Shakespeare plays are as much rooted in the world of commerce and monetary exchange as The Comedy of Errors (see Harris 2004, 71– 73). In fact, nowhere in the Shakespearean canon does the word ‘money’

82  Confusing Twins appear as often as in Errors, and the play’s references to merchants and ducats are second only in number to those in The Merchant of Venice (Whitworth 2008, 49). Shakespeare’s twin comedy arguably offers his first critical depiction of early modern capitalism, right from the first scene, where Egeon reports the tragedy that has torn apart his family by resorting to diction that clearly identifies him as a merchant who “hazard[s] the loss of whom I loved” (1.1.130). Soon, spouses and servants are objectified and commodified, too. Dromio notes bitterly that “servants must their masters’ minds fulfil” (4.1.113), a predicament he shares with his master’s wife and sister-in-law. The dialogue between Luciana and Adriana in which they discuss the husband-­wife relationship, with the unmarried sister advising the married one to be obedient and to accept man’s natural mastery over woman (2.1.10–42), is amongst the most controversial passages of the play, with ‘purchased’ prostitute and ‘acquired’ spouse becoming increasingly hard to tell apart. In an impassionate speech intended to save her marriage, Adriana talks about “the crime of lust” that has mingled with her blood and about the danger of “[b]eing strumpeted by contagion” with her husband’s adulterous flesh (2.2.144–146), terminology that evokes prostitution and (venereal) disease. The courtesan, on the other hand, toys with marital tropes when she refers to the ring she has given to Antipholus and to promises he has made her (4.3.82–94). These passages contain Errors’ most pronounced satirical attack on the institutionalised system of marriage and reproduction. By suggesting that wives and prostitutes are ‘purchased’ in similar fashion and by resorting to images of pollution and cleansing, they simultaneously touch upon the micro-level of individual relationships as well as the macro-level of social institutions and of the body politic. If the household represents “the essential economic unit for credit” (Perry 2003, 46), then marriage functions, first and foremost, as a tool to establish credit-worthiness and also as a social institution. Adriana may invoke conjugal obligations of biblical proportions in her famous elm/vine speech (2.2.177–183), yet when the curtain comes down, she and Antipholus are no closer to a reconciliation, since she has caught on to her husband’s cheating. This is worth addressing because it highlights that the re-appearance of the missing twin presents a veritable crisis to family units that are fragile to begin with. Twinship is a harbinger of dynastic conflicts, and it is no coincidence that the Inns of Court, where The Comedy of Errors premiered in 1594, frequently chose twin plays for their annual performances. They would have provided plenty of legal conundrums for the audience to dissect afterwards (Knight 2002, 31), while throwing in the basics of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structures of kinship for good measure. On his arrival in Act 3 of Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals, Elder Wou’dbe invokes Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech from

Confusing Twins  83 Julius Cesar (1599) when he bids welcome to “country, father, friends”, yet immediately adds an afterthought to put the value of filial relationships into doubt: “My brother too (if brothers can be friends)” (Farquhar 1702/1795, 58). He has much reason to doubt the younger sibling’s cordiality. After all, his brother Ben is a mean-spirited schemer in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Richard III who constantly curses his place in the pecking order as the younger, hunchbacked twin who feels “cruelly deprived of my birth-right” (16). Ironically, it is Ben and not Hermes who is a chip off the old block: the old Wou’dbe had a hump, too, but by virtue of being the younger twin, Ben is forever made to look “like a branch of another kind,” without the consolation prize. “Had I the same title to the deformity, I could bear it”, yet as it is, he has “but two eyesores in the world, a brother before me, and a hump behind me” (16–17). Even from beyond the grave, the late patriarch has the two sons by their throats, and the twinned constellation forces them into a fight of first-born versus second-born, the Biblical connotations of which are not lost on the characters: “My brother! What is brother? We are all so; and the first two were enemies. He stands before me in the road of life, to rob me of my pleasures” (51). No wonder they are hardly addressed by their first names throughout the play; ‘Elder’ and ‘Younger Wou’dbe’ are quite sufficient to establish their dramatic roles. “I have a brother that I love very well”, the younger one reasons, “but since one of us must want, I had rather he should starve than I” (36). Tellingly, Ben blames his deformity not on his hunchbacked father, but on his mother and his twin, whose “crowding” in the womb is credited with having “spoiled my shape” (16–17). Ben’s habit of blaming the deformity on the maternal body shows that he is familiar with the contemporary discourse on monstrous births, as does his subsequent attempt to convince his father that Hermes, the elder twin, was a bastard and that it is in fact he who “was first begotten” (44). The other female ‘meddler’ who becomes part of the scheme is the dishonest midwife, who goes so far as to convince the brothers that their father lied about the order of their births so as to make sure that the non-deformed brother would be the designated heir. After all, when kinship intersects with twinship and the younger son is essentially just required as “an insurance against the death of the eldest son” (McDonald 1996, 260), all that the aspiring patriarch can hope for is that it will be the stronger of the two children who leaves the womb first. Comedian Jermaine Fowler, himself a second-born twin, riffs on this very constellation in his show, Give ‘em Hell, Kid (2015). While his elder brother, Jerome, was named after the father, he claims that he only got the name of one of the Jackson Five whom “nobody gave a fuck about”, rather than “something nice” like “Jerome 2.0.” The Twin Rivals remains an exception amongst twin comedies in that it only adopts one twin brother into the existing kinship systems, rejecting the crippled one as unsuitable marriage material. The play knows no such qualms,

84  Confusing Twins however, when it comes to pairing other supporting characters, including the much-abused Clelia with her sexual exploiter. Twelfth Night sows similar doubts regarding the validity of its matchmaking, concluding with several uncertain marriages. Lisa Jardine uses contemporary court reports to argue that the codes of conduct in the early modern household implied sexual authority of the patriarch over each member of his household, irrespective of their gender, and she reads Twelfth Night as a play about servants who find their place within a household’s pecking order. The twins’ eventual marriages to Olivia and Orsino, respectively, do not contradict this agenda, quite the contrary. In an environment where love not only connotes desire of the heart but also the “bond of service” (Jardine 1996, 72), the kinship systems neatly worked out in the end are a logical continuation of what has been going on before, although there is a gendered twist involved. Traditionally, it is the exchange of women that “accompanies and stimulates exchanges of other ‘wealth’ among groups of men” and at the same time hinders them from partaking in the res publica (Irigaray 1997, 175). Yet in Twelfth Night, it is an androgynous twin pair that enters into a system of mutual dependency and kinship. The speed with which Orsino gets over his former infatuation with Olivia suggests that he has achieved his original goal, after all, and though the solution does not look as symmetrical as in The Comedy of Errors or Two Much, where brothers marry sisters, Olivia bids Orsino “[t]o think me as well a sister, as a wife” (5.1.316), which he promptly does, addressing her as “sweet sister” in return (5.1.383). Olivia’s invitation to “crown th’ alliance” at her house (5.1.317) signals to the reader that it may not be an exclusive (old) boys’ network that is being enacted here, but that Illyria will witness the rise of a new and powerful clan that not only socialises but also means business. For this purpose, children will be a valuable asset. The body becomes useful by virtue of its “productive” force (Foucault 1975/1979, 26), but also via its re-productive potential. In Twelfth Night, Feste spells out the material aspect of wooing when Cesario gives him two coins. Feste tries to bargain for a bigger reward, arguing that two coins are likely to produce offspring: “Would not a pair of these have bred, sir?” (3.1.50) By suggesting that coins should breed in order to produce more coins, he highlights the way in which capitalist forms of transaction rely on the unholy practice of usury, but the image can also be inverted so that ‘breeding’ works as the tenor rather than the vehicle of the metaphor: it is progeny that ensures wealth and status. In the process, genetic code determines family resemblance, which is in turn taken as a guarantee that the heir is legitimate. When Gwalter in Patient Grissill sees his twins for the first time, he is primarily interested in whether the boy resembles him; as we saw in Farquhar’s play, likeness can just as well play second fiddle to primogeniture, particularly if it is attributed on the basis of disability.

Confusing Twins  85 There are several reasons why it is the twin plays, in particular, that highlight how a “community of credit [is transformed] into a community of superabundant kinship” (Perry 2003, 47). The twin pairs, by virtue of resemblance, not only allow for claims of a distinct ‘family brand,’ but they are also utilised to make for more binding ties between two tribes: “convenient twinning can iron out the crumpled social fabric of early modern life” (Jardine 1996, 77). In Errors, Antipholus of Ephesus takes care of his newly arrived brother, who is yet to be domesticated but for whom a prospective wife is already waiting in the shape of Luciana, his brother’s sister-in-law, while fears of the Other and the notion of the uncanny are expelled in grand exhibitions of domestic bliss. The revelation that the foreign intruder is, in fact, the long-lost twin brother has ambiguous implications. After all, the gesture of fraternisation redirects fears of contamination and disease back to the nuclear family, where trouble is imminent. Once again, we must not be deceived by the plays’ happy endings, necessitated, as they are, by generic convention. The two Dromios, as subalterns, may be free to enjoy their heartfelt embrace and to walk off-stage “hand in hand, not one before another” (5.1.428), but the two Antipholi are headed for an inevitable rivalry for primogeniture, as not even their father is sure which one is the elder.15 This does not turn Errors into one of the ‘Problem Plays,’ but it invokes one of their main features: a tension between form and content that is “impossible to resolve” (Margolies 2012, 2). Place just a touch more emphasis on ‘purity’ of blood and inner-familial proximity, and you are halfway to the dynastic, incestuous madness of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which also operates with a variety of farcical tropes. As long as the happy ending is respected and blood-shed avoided, the play’s numerous tensions may be pacified but not properly resolved. Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals, much closer to the generic hybridity of the Problem Plays than to classical farce, can testify to that. This kind of fraternal rivalry also features prominently throughout the next chapter, which will turn towards the ‘filial struggles’ of adaptation.

Notes 1 A brief overview of the most frequent uses of the twin trope in mistaken identity plots is given by Kröhnke (1999, 288–291). 2 A.R. Gurney and Donald Westlake are the only American authors covered in this chapter (with Westlake’s text being that rarest of things, a farce in prose). 3 The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1614), one of Shakespeare’s collaborations with John Fletcher, was allegedly performed as The Twins Tragedy when it first premiered (Grote 2002, 204) Cardenio, another Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration (of which no copy survives), appears to have been structured around a variation of the twin trope, too; at least one can gather as much from Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood (1727), widely believed to be an adaptation of Cardenio.

86  Confusing Twins 4 At the same time, The Comedy of Errors disobeys Aristotelian guidelines. After all, the play relies heavily on farcical double-play and an endless list of outrageous coincidences without which the whole structure would collapse. 5 The device was named after The Corsican Brothers (1852), Charles Kean’s stage adaptation of an Alexandre Dumas novel (Les frères corses, 1844). The play’s first act required for the ghost of Louis dei Franchi to reveal to his twin brother Lucien how he was murdered. Bram Stoker, who oversaw a revival of the play in 1880 and was possibly inspired by it to write his own twin horror tale, The Dualitists (1887), later remembered how audience members were flabbergasted at the “uncanniness of the twin brothers seeing themselves, one living and one dead, at the same time” (Hoeveler 2012, 65). 6 This is how film studies, particularly in the United States, tends to understand the term farce, linking it to the Vaudeville tradition and silent-film clowning (see Bermel 1982). The evolution of film comedy somewhat mirrors the development of the twin motif in literature, as the fast-paced frenzy of farce gradually gives way to psychological horror. 7 In 2011, film scholars dug up some reels of The White Shadow (1924), the first feature film for which Hitchcock directed a few scenes and the only Hitchcock film to feature a twin plot (see Kerzoncuf/Barr 2015, 52). When Richard Hannay, the protagonist of The 39 Steps (1935), is handcuffed to Pamela, he refers to the two of them as Siamese twins, and actual Siamese twins feature in the circus troupe in Saboteur (1942) – sisters who cannot agree on anything and whose bickering is echoed in the figure of the threeheaded knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). 8 The label of the ‘Problem Play’ is usually not applied to the twin plays, though some critics point out the problematic and unresolved plot strands in Twelfth Night (see Margolies 2012, 14). 9 Antonio is frequently discussed in conjunction with his name-sake in The Merchant of Venice, allegedly Shakespeare’s most openly gay character. 10 Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Marcel Hartwig (2013) sketch how the midwife manual contradicts the prevalent notion that mothers were estranged from their children in the Renaissance, as outlined by Philippe Ariès in his seminal work on childhood. 11 In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud remarks that “the anal zone is well suited by its position to act as a medium through which sexuality may attach itself to other somatic functions” (1905/1989, 265). 12 This aspect is reflected in remarkably few twin narratives, including Susan Ferrier’s novel Marriage (1818), where Lady Juliana, instead of delivering “the ardently desired heir,” gives birth to “twin-daughters, who could only be regarded as additional burdens on [the house’s] poverty” (237). 13 Daisy Murray explores twin tragedies of the Renaissance, including The Duchess of Malfi, in much more detail (see Murray 2017, 31–62). 14 In 2008, Saturday Night Live ran the skit “Mirror Image,” in which identical twins (played by Amy Adams and Kristen Wiig) successfully switch places until one of them gets fat; in 2015, the show revisited the idea in “Brother 2 Brother” (starring Chris Hemsworth and Taran Killam), where non-identical twins try the switch, only for the smart but less handsome twin to be confronted with a long list of his physical shortcomings. 15 Egeon contradicts himself. Initially, he claims that his wife took care of “the latter-born,” yet a few lines later, he says that it was he who looked after “[m]y youngest boy” (1.1.77 and 123).

Confusing Twins  87

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Other Media “Brother 2 Brother” (2015). S40E15 of Saturday Night Live. Cr. Lorne Michaels. City Lights (1931). Dir. Charlie Chaplin. United Artists. Dead Ringers (1988). Dir. David Cronenberg. Fox. Jermaine Fowler: Give ‘em Hell, Kid (2015). Dir. N/A. “Mirror Image” (2008). S33E7 of Saturday Night Live. Cr. Lorne Michaels.

88  Confusing Twins La Pretora (1976). Dir. Lucio Fulci. Dear International. Psycho (1960). Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount. Saboteur (1942). Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal. The 39 Steps (1935). Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Gaumont-British. The White Shadow (1924). Dir. Graham Cutts/Alfred Hitchcock. Gainsborough. “Zanzibar” (2018). S4E1 of Inside No. 9. Cr. Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. BBC.

Secondary Texts Anon. (1651/1676). Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives: or, a Guide for Women. The Second Part. London. Anon. (1684/1700). Aristotle’s Masterpiece: or, the Secrets of Generation Displayed in all the Parts Thereof. London. Aristotle (1943). Generation of Animals. Trans. A.L. Peck. London: Heinemann. Aristotle (1987). Poetics. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. London: Duckworth. Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin (2016). Seinfeldia: How a Show about Nothing Changed Everything. New York: Simon & Schuster. Barrough, Philip (1583/1601). The Method of Phisick, Containing the Causes, Signes, and Cures of Inward Diseases in Mans Body, from the Head to the Foots. London. Bermel, Albert (1982). Farce: A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Bergson, Henri (1900/1994). “Laughter.” Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 61–190. Bloom, Harold (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead. Boorde, Andrew (1547/1575). The Breviarie of Health: Wherin Doth Folow, Remedies, for All Maner of Sicknesses and Diseases, the Which May Be in Man or Woman. London. Callaghan, Dympna (2000). Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. London/New York: Routledge. Callaghan, Dympna (2013). Who Was William Shakespeare? Malden: WileyBlackwell. Cartwright, Kent (2009). “Language, Magic, the Dromios, and The Comedy of Errors.” William Shakespeare: Comedies. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 127–137. Cooney, Ray (2014). “Ray Cooney’s Six Rules of Farce.” The Guardian, www. telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10688416/Ray-Cooneys-six-rules-of-farce. html. Crawford, Julie (2005). Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Cressy, David (2002). Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: OUP. Culler, Jonathan (2011). Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP. Culpeper, Nicholas (1651/1668). A Directory for Mid-Wives: Or, A Guide for Women, in Their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling Their Children. Edinburgh.

Confusing Twins  89 Davis, Jessica M. (1978). Farce. London: Methuen. Dennis, John (1695/1939). “Letter to William Congreve.” Critical Works of John Dennis. Vol. II. Ed. E.N. Hooker. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 385. Doniger, Wendy (2000). The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P. Dryden, John (1668/1970). “Preface to An Evening’s Love.” The Works of John Dryden. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: U of California P, 202–213. Dryden, John (1692/1762). “Preface to Cleomenes.” The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq. Vol. 6. London: Tonson, n.p. Eagleton, Terry (2010). On Evil. New Haven/London: Yale UP. Elam, Keir (2014). “New Directions: ‘Ready to Distrust Mine Eyes’: Optics and Graphics in Twelfth Night.” ‘Twelfth Night’: A Critical Reader. Eds. Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown. London: Bloomsbury, 99–122. Fissell, Mary E. (2006). Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England. Oxford: OUP. Foucault, Michel (1961/2008). History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London/New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1975/1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund (1905/1989). “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York/London: Norton, 239–293. Frye, Northrop (1957/1990). Anatomy of Criticism. London: Penguin. Gay, Penny (2008). The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies. Cambridge: CUP. Gélis, Jacques (1991). History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe. Trans. Rosemary Morris. Cambridge: Polity. Greenblatt, Stephen (1994). “Shakespeare Bewitched.” Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions. Eds. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells. Newark: U of Delaware P, 17–42. Greer, Germaine (2007). Shakespeare’s Wife. New York: Harper Collins. Grote, David (2002). The Best Actors in the World: Shakespeare and His Acting Company. Westport: Greenwood. Harris, Jonathan Gil (2004). “‘Some Love that Drew Him Oft from Home’: Syphilis and International Commerce in The Comedy of Errors.” Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage. Eds. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 69–92. Hoeveler, Diane Long (2012). “Victorian Gothic Drama.” Victorian Gothic. Eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 57–71. Holland, Peter (2000). “Farce.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge: CUP, 107–126. Horlacher, Stefan (2010). “Zur Frage der Präsenz ‘starker Frauen’ und der Dekonstruktion des Patriarchats in der englischen Renaissancetragödie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von John Websters The Duchess of Malfi.” Anglia 128.2: 246–272. Huet, Marie-Hélène (1993). Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge/London: Harvard UP. Hughes, Leo (1956/1979). A Century of English Farce. Westport: Greenwood. Hunt, Maurice (2011). “Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and ‘The Pregnant Enemy’: The Devil in What You Will.” Upstart Crow 30: 5–17.

90  Confusing Twins Inchbald, Elizabeth (1808). “Remarks.” The Comedy of Errors, as Performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. By William Shakespeare. London: Longman, 3–6. Irigaray, Luce (1997). “Women on the Market.” The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. Ed. Alan D. Schrift. London: Routledge, 174–189. Jardine, Lisa (1996). Reading Shakespeare Historically. London/New York: Routledge. Kerzoncuf, Alain, and Charles Barr (2015). Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films. Lexington: UP of Kentucky. Knight, W. Nicholas (2002). Autobiography in Shakespeare’s Plays: “Lands so by His Father Lost.” New York: Lang. Kröhnke, Karl (1999). “Von In- und Dividuen: Zwillinge in der Literatur.” Zwillinge. Eds. Karl and Friedrich Kröhnke. Frankfurt/Leipzig: Insel, 277–314. Lahr, John (1986). “Introduction” and “Notes”. The Orton Diaries. By Joe Orton. London: Methuen, 11–31 and 35–266. Maguire, Laurie (2007). Shakespeare’s Names. Oxford: OUP. Mallin, Eric Scott (1995). Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England. Berkeley: U of California P. Margolies, David (2012). Shakespeare’s Irrational Endings: The Problem Plays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mauriceau, Francis (1673). The Accomplisht Midwife, Treating of the Diseases of Women with Child, and in Child-Bed. Trans. Hugh Chamberlen. London. McConnell, Russell Hugh (2012). “Antipholus and the Exorcists: The Acts of the Apostles in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.” Renaissance Papers: 31–39. McDonald, Russ (1996). The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare. Boston/New York: Bedford Books. Mercer, John M. (1989). “Twin Relationships in Shakespeare.” Upstart Crow 9: 24–39. Murray, Daisy (2017). Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare. London/New York: Routledge. Myers, William (1995). “Introduction.” ‘The Recruiting Officer’ and Other Plays. By George Farquhar. Oxford/New York: OUP, vii–xxiii. Paré, Ambroise (1573/1982). On Monsters and Marvels. Trans. Janis L. Pallister. Chicago/London: U of Chicago P. Perry, Curtis (2003). “Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia in The Comedy of Errors.” Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism. Ed. Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 39–51. Peterson, Kaara L. (2004). “Performing Arts: Hysterical Disease, Exorcism, and Shakespeare’s Theater.” Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage. Eds. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 3–28. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika, and Marcel Hartwig (2013). “Conceptions of Childhood in Renaissance Midwife Manuals.” Childhood in the English Renaissance. Ed. Anja Müller. Trier: WVT, 133–144. Raynald, Thomas (1540/1634). The Birth of Man-kinde; Otherwise Named, the Womans Booke. London. Rothstein, Eric (1964). “Farquhar’s Twin-Rivals and the Reform of Comedy.” PMLA 79.1: 33–41.

Confusing Twins  91 Savage, Elizabeth (2008). “‘For Want of Clelia’: Re-placing the Maternal Body in The Twin-Rivals.” Comparative Drama 42.4: 481–504. Schwanebeck, Wieland (2016). “The Womb as a Battlefield: Debating Medical Authority in the Renaissance Midwife Manual.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 23.2: 101–114. Schwanebeck, Wieland (forthcoming). “Shakespearean Double-Play and Illicit Desires: Erotic Twinship in Lucio Fulci’s La pretora (1976).” Cinerotic: Eroticism in Films and Video Games. Eds. Angela Fabris and Jörg Helbig. Trier: WVT. Sermon, William (1671). The Ladies Companion, or the English Midwife. London. Sharp, Jane (1671). The Midwives Book. Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered. Directing Childbearing Women How to Behave Themselves in Their Conception, Breeding, Bearing, and Nursing of Children. London. Shaughnessy, Robert (2011). The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare. London/New York: Routledge. Shaw, Bernard (1896/1954). “On Deadheads and Other Matters.” Our Theatres in the Nineties. Vol. 2. London: Constable, 1954. 229–235. Smellie, William (1752/1876). Smellie’s Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery. London: The New Sydenham Society. Smith, Leslie (1989). Modern British Farce. Houndmills: Macmillan. Viney, William (2013). “The Significance of Twins in the Middle Ages.” The Wonder of Twins, https://thewonderoftwins.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/ the-significance-of-twins-in-medieval-and-early-modern-europe/. Walsh, Groesbeck, and Robert M. Pool (1940). “Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Twins and Twinning.” Southern Medicine and Surgery 102.4: 173–176. Wells, Stanley, et al. (1987). William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Clarendon. Whitworth, Charles (2008). “Introduction” and “Notes”. The Comedy of Errors. By William Shakespeare. Oxford: OUP, 1–180. Williams, George Walton (2005). “Shakespeare’s Twins: Choric Juxtaposition.” Renaissance Papers: 43–50. Willughby, Percival (1670/1863). Observations in Midwifery, as also The Countrey Midwifes Opusculum or Vade Mecum. Warwick: Shakespeare Printing. Wilson, Richard (1993). Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Wynne-Davies, Marion (1998). “‘The Swallowing Womb’: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Ed. Susan Zimmerman. Houndmills: Macmillan, 212–236. Zinman, Toby Silverman (1991). “Blizintsy/Dvojniki – Twins/Doubles – ­Hapgood/Hapgood.” Modern Drama 34.2: 312–321.

4 Appropriating Twins

The field of adaptation always sets the stage for a power struggle, one which bears some resemblance to the prenatal struggle of twins in utero. The elder is usually thought of as the one who keeps the upper hand, as embodied in the idea of primogeniture. Adaptors thus come with the stigma of second-born children, who are suspected of always emulating their fraternal rivals and of following jealously in their footsteps. Gilbert Adair, having adapted his own twin tale The Holy Innocents (1988) into the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), argues that the novel and the film inevitably end up being twins themselves, though “not identical [ones]” (Adair 1988/2004, 193). He writes this in the afterword to a subsequent edition of his novel, which is now sold under the title of Bertolucci’s film, the ‘latter-born’ having absorbed the elder. The cultural work of adaptation is often associated with the stain of the illegitimate and of the criminal, so it is perhaps no surprise that many of the adaptations discussed throughout this chapter do not openly identify as Shakespearean offspring but rather appropriate the Shakespearean text. It is this power struggle I want to investigate, conceptualising adaptation as twinship while simultaneously looking at adaptations in which the very theme of twinship is tackled. By focusing on The Comedy of Errors, I also aim to involve Shakespeare, not in his usual capacity as the revered source of adaptations, but as an adaptor. Like no other Shakespeare play, The Comedy of Errors challenges the obligatory assumption driving so much of the idolatrous criticism surrounding the playwright: that he was an original genius who only adapted in order to improve upon his sources. This popular yarn suggests that Shakespeare moved far above the spheres of such mundane activities as appropriation or, God forbid, plagiarism: if he ‘borrowed,’ he paid back with interest. It is on these grounds that Harold Bloom excludes Shakespeare from his definitive study on The Anxiety of Influence, arguing that his “absorption of the precursor [Marlowe]” was “absolute” (1975, 11). At the same time, Errors is proof that Shakespeare was a versatile adaptor himself. He not only ‘multiplies’ a pre-existing literary property by writing a new version of it, he also duplicates its key ingredients, which are ‘double’ to begin

Appropriating Twins  93 with, expanding Plautus’s play and increasing the number of twins. At the same time, Shakespeare partakes in a power struggle that permeates all of Adaptation Studies: the sibling rivalry between two and more spins on the ‘same’ narrative material, which mirrors the conflict between the first-born who tries to establish his patrimonial rights and the younger one (cut from the same genetic material, as it were) who harbours an inferiority complex.

Shakespeare the Adaptor From the fact that few words seem to collocate so well with the name Shakespeare as ‘genius’ and ‘original’ follow certain problems one has to overcome in order to accommodate the idea of Shakespeare the a­ daptor. No-one will deny that Shakespeare adapted existing material, yet his reputation rests very much on the idea of “unsurpassed originality” (­Fischlin/Fortier 2000, 1). For a long time, Shakespeare criticism followed the assumption that “God doesn’t make mistakes”, with the result that the canon is always “arbitrarily predefined as faultfree, Shakesperfect” (Taylor 1990, 408 and 410). As the predominant Shakespeare narrative rests on the idea of individuality, his glorification had to occur at the expense of “denigrating many [other writers]” (ibid. 407), to the extent that Shakespeare-the-adaptor and Shakespeare-the-­collaborator were written out of history to make way for the ‘isolated genius’ trope (Henderson 2006, 2). This process was no doubt facilitated by the fact that Shakespeare “stole from authors whom the cultivated of the eighteenth century did not read” (Saunders 1992, 42). The field of Adaptation Studies has for a long time subscribed to the creed of Shakespearean ‘oneness,’ as the latter resonates quite strongly with the “depressingly middlebrow view of cultural currency” that only allows “one creator per project” (Leitch 2010, 65), despite everything we know about the sheer pragmatics of artistic creation and about the vivid adaptation culture of the Renaissance literary scene. Generations of Shakespeare scholars have tip-toed around the problem, employing hedges and other disclaimers to indicate that they are not being ‘serious’ when they say ‘Shakespeare.’ Marjorie Garber suggests that ‘Shakespeare’ these days is not so much a man as “a belief system and a literary standard as well as a set of works” (2003, 3). Yet putting the Shakespeare signifier in inverted commas has, in fact, not resolved the underlying problem, and he continues to serve as the most obvious amongst many exceptions from Barthes’s well-known dictum: in the case of Shakespeare, “reports of the author’s death have been greatly exaggerated” (Henderson 2006, 7). In order to sustain the dominant narrative, the disciples have been busy, and the history of ‘bardolatry’ (Shaw) is brimming with instances of forged gospel and attempts to purify the oeuvre. For Garber, the idea of an authoritative Shakespearean text remains as

94  Appropriating Twins elusive as the MacGuffin in Hitchcock’s films, Poe’s purloined letter, or Lacan’s objet petit a (2003, 152). Julie Sanders has made a strong case for the reconceptualisation of adaptation as ‘appropriation.’ The label tends to be understood as controversial, yet Sanders argues that it implies a co-operative model of adaptation and liberates the ‘secondary’ work from the pressure of identifying as an adaptation (see Sanders 2016, 3–6). This is important not only in a Web 2.0 environment, where “whole new communities of practice” engage in “adaptive work” (ibid. 4), but is also potentially helpful for a revision of the kind of literary historiography that relies on powerful and seemingly irrevocable signifiers like that of the ‘isolated genius’ William Shakespeare. Sanders thus quite deliberately invokes the spectre of illegitimacy that comes with the label of appropriation and invests the adaptor with a degree of criminal energy: a wide-spread trend in Adaptation Studies in recent years. Thomas Leitch (2018) uses the case of Patricia Highsmith to argue for the criminal energy inherent in all adaptation, while Julie Grossman borrows the metaphor of ‘hideous progeny’ from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) to argue that creative forms of adaptation constitute a “shocking violation of original and organically pure matter when adapted or reshaped in new contexts” (Grossman 2015, 2). In her conceptualisation of adaptation as monstrous, Grossman emphasises the idea that adaptations are “difficult offspring” (8), which is neither too far removed from the adaptation-as-twin idea that my argument will culminate in, nor from the label of appropriation, particularly if we picture a Frankenstein-like grave-robber who obtains ‘spare parts’ for his humanoid creature.1 Insofar as appropriation is about forcefully taking possession of something, it always borders on “abduction, adoption and theft” (Marsden 1991, 1), not to mention the idea of “a hostile takeover” (Fischlin/Fortier 2000, 3). Adaptation scholars usually absolve Shakespeare himself of such crimes against his literary forerunners. Either they implicitly accept that Shakespeare’s signature simply obliterates everything in the process of adaptation – he clearly is the monstrous sibling who refuses to share and who absorbs his twin in utero – or they limit themselves to assessments of how others have appropriated his work, careful always to maintain a degree of agency for Shakespeare, who allegedly “speak[s] directly to the appropriator[s]” (Huang/Rivlin 2014, 4) and thus continues to haunt them from beyond the grave, like an intertextual vampire. Nowhere could the double standard be more evident than in the critical history of The Comedy of Errors, a play that Shakespeare scholarship often sidelines due to its heavy intertextual debt to Plautus. Gary Taylor (1999) dedicates a stellar chapter to the Shakespearean appropriation of Plautus in his critical assessment of the ongoing ‘bardolatry’ and shows what bizarre consequences follow from Shakespeare being

Appropriating Twins  95 treated as the privileged nodal point through which all adaptation traffic must pass. For many decades, critics singled out Errors as Shakespeare’s first comedy, which allowed them to sketch a straightforward narrative of growing refinement and of authorial emancipation that went from the derivate towards the original, culminating in The Tempest (1611). This narrative resonates strongly with the fact that Errors is a farce, a genre whose critical reputation I have discussed in Chapter 3. Suffice it to say here that it is often disparaged as a somewhat adolescent genre that allegedly favours lack of restraint and immaturity; according to Albert Bermel’s somewhat reductive account, it is “favored by authors in their formative years” and abandoned as soon as “their style grows more dignified” and “their content more grave” (1982, 15). From this follows a narrative of growing refinement in Shakespeare criticism, where the playwright starts out as an apprentice who ‘translates’ or ‘adapts’ Plautus in order to use his play as a trial run for his own dramatic production. Yet far from being content with merely adding a few jokes here and there, Shakespeare “outPlautuses Plautus” (Taylor 1990, 396) and in so doing, allegedly makes the Menaechmi more complex and nuanced. The pragmatic side of the argument – that Shakespeare has to stretch a comic interlude of some 1,200 lines into a five-act play – frequently goes unmentioned in the process. The underlying logic dictates that Shakespeare cannot lose, no matter what he does to the source: To say that Shakespeare complicated his source does not prove that he improved it. In complicating the story he also made it more improbable, and the same critics who here praise implausible complication will elsewhere applaud Shakespeare’s efforts to simplify and plausify the stories he stole from other sources. (Ibid.) This Shakespeare is somebody who only requires source texts in order to improve them and who never errs, which makes him not an adaptor in the traditional sense but rather a cosmetic surgeon of unrivalled skill. Marie Phillips, in her prose adaptation of The Comedy of Errors (Oh, I Do Like to Be …, 2019), turns this view on its head when she replaces the two Antipholi with two Shakespeare clones, one of whom is a writer who always gets offended when reviewers call him “a pale copy” of the original (Phillips 2019, 33). Evidently, Shakespeare’s disciples try their best to resolve a fundamental contradiction: that an allegedly unique writer owed his exalted status to “his ability to assimilate the texts of many others into his work” (Fischlin/Fortier 2000, 8). With Shakespeare, there appears to be no such thing as plagiarism; instead, we talk about artful techniques of creative borrowing (Sanders 2016, 45), even though it only takes regular plagiarism-detection software to establish that many passages in

96  Appropriating Twins Shakespeare’s plays can be traced back to other manuscripts (see Flood 2018). In Sanders’s typology, Shakespeare’s plays would feature as ‘embedded texts,’ that is: texts based on the productive strategy of re-­ crafting a pre-­existing property, where intertextual awareness can enrich the audience’s experience without being integral to appreciating the work (Sanders 2016, 37). Some of this may be down to the medium itself, as stage adaptations are not as frequently read in terms of their fidelity (Leitch 2010, 66), but most recipients deliberately overlook the adaptive work that went into The Comedy of Errors, a circumstance which has exerted a significant impact on the play’s adaptation history. My choice of this play as point of departure for this chapter does not imply that I want to bestow any degree of originality upon the play in the sense of it having come ‘first,’ and all the others second and third. What speaks for using Shakespeare’s version of Errors as a starting point is the very problem it presents to Shakespeare criticism. While both of the Shakespearean twin farces have enjoyed a diverse history of productions and adaptations in a variety of media, the adaptation history of The Comedy of Errors presents more fruitful conundrums, both in terms of its content, its background history, and its legacy on stage and screen. The text illustrates the very process of twinning inherent in adaptation insofar as it is a play taken with the idea of appropriation, as well as with the problem of attributing primogeniture to one of two identical-looking properties.

The Comedy of Errors and Its Offspring In a foreword to the published version of Charlie (and Donald) Kaufman’s script for Adaptation (2002), Susan Orlean, whose book The Orchid Thief (1998) served as the literary source for this highly meta-reflexive comedy, likens the idea of selling the rights to her book and having it adapted into a screenplay to the process of putting up a child for adoption, only to have it raised by smart yet slightly mad guys who completely “turn it upside down and inside out, dress it up in funny clothes and even change its name”, so that it is no longer “the baby [she] remembered” (Orlean 2002, vii). This reaction is certainly understandable given the way Adaptation – a twin fable in its own right, and one I will discuss at the end of this chapter – involves the author herself in its postmodern identity mash-up, reducing Orlean to a neurotic who is torn between her desires to (pro-)create and to crawl back into the womb. Orlean’s worries about her creative ‘baby’ eerily resonate with the plot of The Comedy of Errors, where Emilia loses her two sons at sea and is only reunited with them decades later, when the two Antipholi present themselves to her as the fully formed products of other people’s upbringing and education. If Orlean is worried about her creative offspring eluding her grasp and repudiating its roots, Shakespeare’s play trusts the

Appropriating Twins  97 matriarch to restore order by recognising her offspring as legitimate and by providing genealogical certainties. However, the play’s further adaptation history does not read like a sustained ‘happy family’ narrative; it is full of ‘black sheep’ who were either disowned by the family or who were more than happy to put themselves up for adoption. Admittedly, the performance history of The Comedy of Errors is no match for any of the great tragedies, or indeed, for more popular Shakespeare comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (see Ford 2006). The latter are not only revived frequently but are also regularly granted new prestigious big-screen adaptations by filmmakers who give Shakespeare a degree of cinematic legitimacy, evading claims that somebody just left a camera running during a dress rehearsal at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Midsummer inspired films by renowned American directors like William Dieterle (1935) and Woody Allen (1982), but browse through the gallery of directors who have attempted ‘official’ adaptations of the twin plays, and you will find mostly men and women of the theatre. Crucially, farce continues to be thought of as a genre that provides little opportunity for directors to leave their mark upon the play. In order for the frantic plots to work properly in performance, there is less room for digging into layers of subtext or for radical revisions of the basic plot and character constellation. This reduces directors to competent stage hands who arrange smooth transitions between scene changes and who point the quickest way towards the dénouement as discreetly as possible. Any more radical or revisionist approach to the plays has inevitably gone at the expense of the twin theme. Some of the seventeenth-century productions that refashioned Twelfth Night (1601) as the tragicomic history of Malvolio, who remains largely inconsequential to Viola’s and Sebastian’s search for each other, omitted the twin plot altogether (Mercer 1993, 97–98). At the same time, Shakespeare’s twin plays remain firmly linked to the realm of theatre, as their sheer ‘see-it-in-order-to-(dis)believe-it’ panache as well as their elaborate timetables of exits and entries are best realised on stage. Frederick S. Boas, in his classic study of Shakespeare, suggests that The Comedy of Errors had to be “seen in its true features by the glow of the foot-lights, not by the solitary student’s lamp” (1896/1910, 170), an assessment that is echoed in statements from authors and critics as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Robert Miola, who points out that few other Shakespeare plays besides Errors have spoken to such various audiences “across unfathomable cultural divides” (1997, 38). Assessments of either play’s performance history tend to be bigger on significant stage productions than on big-screen adaptations, for the simple reason that there are so few of the latter. Most adaptations of either play listed on the Internet Movie Database are stage productions filmed for television. Paradoxically, the twin plays’ unique selling proposition acts simultaneously as the biggest drawback when it comes to mounting new

98  Appropriating Twins productions of them, as the twin effect is hard to achieve in performance and difficult to fuse with cinema’s preferred modus operandi: mimetic realism. The latter’s conventions increasingly affect stage productions aimed at a cine-literate audience (see Mercer 1993, 100–106). Rather than just invite their audience to swallow the bait of the farcical set-up, directors are now more likely to provide superfluous explanations as to why the twins happen to be wearing identical clothes, they will adjust the lighting during scenes of mistaken identity, so as not to stretch credibility too much, and they will insist on casting similar-looking actors, or better: siblings, or even better: identical twins, or best of all: the same actor to play both parts. 2 However, prominent thespians are missing from the historical cast lists because the plays allegedly offer no meaty parts for stars to sink their teeth into. Often, the actors find themselves reduced to stage props who serve as the butt of the joke instead of delivering witty and elaborate speeches. Still, some notable productions and adaptations of the twin plays have counted on the reputation of their virtuoso performers to draw an audience, and sometimes on spectacle. There is the Laurel/ Hardy slapstick version (Our Relations, 1936), the Rodgers/Hart musical (The Boys from Syracuse, 1938), the Bollywood version (Angoor, 1982), the acrobatic vaudeville extravaganza staged by the Flying Karamazov Brothers (The Comedy of Errors, 1987), the female makeover starring Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler (Big Business, 1988), the hip-hop version (The Bomb-itty of Errors, 1999), and the 30-minute bedroom farce Zanzibar, an episode of the BBC show Inside No. 9 (2018) done in iambic pentameter and featuring a lot of Shakespearean word-play and innuendo. There is also Don Zolidis’s The Comedy of Terrible Errors (2018), a meta-farce in the tradition of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982) in which an amateur company consisting of dim-witted and unprepared actors attempts unsuccessfully to perform Shakespeare’s play. While Zolidis’s debt to Frayn and to the West End hit The Play that Goes Wrong (2012) is obvious, there are some inspired jokes here to expose the shortcomings of the original, which is referenced as “Shakespeare’s 28th-most-loved play” (Zolidis 2018, 8). A similar degree of self-reflexivity permeates Marie Phillips’s prose adaptation, in which two Shakespeare clones, who have been raised separately as part of a scientific experiment, end up re-enacting The Comedy of Errors when they show up in the same seaside resort on the same day (Oh, I Do Like to Be …, 2019). Elsewhere, the stagey BBC adaptation of 1983 features The Who’s Roger Daltrey, who, as Dromio, riffs on his band’s notorious reputation for smashing guitars when he has to endure the severe beatings of his master. Otherwise, this version is so suffocatingly respectable that it lists a ‘literary consultant’ but no screenwriter apart from Shakespeare himself in the credits.

Appropriating Twins  99 Interestingly, the filial struggle for primogeniture and legitimacy is mirrored in the play’s reception since only few of these adaptations make an effort to identify as part of the Shakespearean family. Movie audiences have been treated to The Comedy of Errors a number of times, but they may not always have been aware of it, because the films rarely name the Shakespeare play as their source. Indeed, producers of twin comedies have occasionally obliterated their indebtedness to Errors and have thus abstained from cashing in on Shakespeare’s cultural cachet, illustrating that new adaptors effectively continue to do “what Shakespeare did to Plautus in The Comedy of Errors, expropriating what they can use, often without acknowledgement” (Taylor 1999, 205). It is this highly debated status of the play – ‘only’ a farce, and ‘only’ an apprentice work with an allegedly negligible degree of originality – which makes it a valuable source for Adaptation Studies, of course, as it problematises two typical prejudices permeating the field: that film adaptations are likely to flash the prestige of their literary source in order to borrow some of the other medium’s cultural capital, and that the literary source is always ‘original’, with the film adaptation but a secondary phenomenon, an undesired ‘afterbirth,’ as it were. It also serves to highlight several of Adaptation Studies’ ‘twinned’ ideas and concepts.

Thomas Hull, Author of The Comedy of Errors Any attempt to write a complete history of the twin motif in English literary history is complicated by a number of factors, including the notable absence of significant ‘twinnovations’ between the Shakespearean age and the nineteenth century, when the sensational novel and the emerging genre of detective fiction put a new spin on the motif. Twins did not disappear from the literary field altogether during this time; in fact, they remained a popular item in the standard repertory of stage wizardry, especially in comedies of mistaken identity. At the same time, the proliferation of popular comedies like Shakespeare’s twin farces gave rise to a quite different process of twinning. When the theatres of London reopened after the Civil War in 1660, revised versions of Shakespeare’s plays were quickly staged all over the town, with well-documented consequences. Many appropriations of Shakespeare saw the light of day during these years, a process that coincided with and was somehow necessitated by the patent debate that raged throughout the middle of the seventeenth century. By law, newly found theatre companies like those spearheaded by Sir William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew were often forced to ‘reform’ many of the original plays (Clark 1997, xlii), partly because their language was felt to be archaic, and partly because the companies went for legal loopholes in their attempts to obtain permission from the Lord Chamberlain to stage a popular text.

100  Appropriating Twins For several decades, Nahum Tate’s drastically revised version of King Lear (1681), in which Lear and Cordelia survive, was more widely known than Shakespeare’s play, and it took until the mid-nineteenth century for the earlier version to return to the stage (Clark 1997, xli–­lxviii). Dedicated Shakespeareans are quick to take offence with cosmetic surgery of the kind that Tate performed, though Shakespeare himself was similarly unscrupulous when it came to applying his skills to pre-existing literary properties. All of this occurred before the emergence of the modern concept of authorship, so we should be careful not to impose our contemporary notion of plagiarism on the Elizabethan age, which did not yet read quotation marks as signs that said, “Private Property. No Trespassing” (de Grazia 1991, 66). The success of Tate’s Lear inspired various other attempts to rewrite Shakespeare in order “to please a new audience” or to adjust the texts “to a changed political climate” (Marsden 1991, 3). The success of Thomas Hull’s spin on The Comedy of Errors, as well as William Woods’s and J.P. Kemble’s versions, underlines that the twin plays lent themselves naturally to this kind of adaptive business, but also that Errors, unlike other Shakespeare texts, held but “limited canonical authority” (Ford 2006, 12). The somewhat uncanny co-presence of well-known Shakespeare texts and their ‘twins’ leads to paradoxical assessments that often border on the farcical, as the second-born ‘usurper’ is taken by some to be identical with its sibling, by others not. The Comedy of Errors has been called a wildly popular play that was regularly revived throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while others have suggested that it was not staged at all for a century, or rather that only its plagiarising ‘twins’ were staged (Sillars 2006, 17). The list includes Every Body Mistaken (1716), See If You Like It, or ‘Tis All a Mistake (1734), Hull’s The Twins, or The Comedy of Errors (1793), and Woods’s The Twins, or Which Is Which? (1780), and as becomes evident from the titles, they acknowledge their Shakespearean (and Plautine) source to different degrees, often by way of allusion rather than by direct naming. The Twins as revised by Hull, a renowned actor who had also played the part of Elder Wou’dbe in Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals, went through different versions, and it can be safely assumed that it was his most popular work. Not only are there records of it having been produced several times throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, it also saw a private print-run in 1770 and was, in turn, appropriated by others (see Hogan 1952, 149–151). Frederick Reynolds’ version of 1819 uses most of Hull’s text, supplementing it with some of the most popular bits from other works of Shakespeare.3 Hull had become synonymous with the material as a result of performing the role of Antipholus of Syracuse throughout the 1760s and revisiting it several decades later, this time playing the part of Egeon (Wells 1971, n.p.). To contemporary London theatregoers, his and Woods’s would have been the more authoritative

Appropriating Twins  101 versions of Errors until the Shakespearean text regained authority in the nineteenth century (Clark 1997, xliii). Neither Hull nor Woods make an attempt to write Shakespeare out of literary history and to claim exclusive credit for what was already a popular text, and their plays are by no means fakes. However, the way they approach the material, particular in Hull’s case, suggests a relationship between text and pre-text similar to the one at work in Jorge Luis Borges’s famous thought experiment, Pierre Menard, autor del ‘Quijote’ (Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’, 1939). Borges’s obituary of the fictitious Menard recalls the latter’s attempt to reconstruct the famous Cervantes novel verbatim, with the twist that Menard insists his project is not an adaptation in the vein of other “parasitic books,” as Menard, rather than trying to write “another Quixote,” wants “to compose the Quixote […] word for word and line for line” (Borges 1939/1998, 36–37). Borges’s narrator ends up juxtaposing the exact same passages in Cervantes’s and Menard’s versions, finding stylistic difference in them, and concluding with an appreciation of Menard’s Quixote as “more subtle” and “infinitely richer” (ibid. 39–40). In the spirit of Jacques Derrida, the story suggests that “identical texts can mean different things” because they are “never the same or identical to themselves” (Giskin 2005, 105). Hull’s project is not on a par with that of Menard, as he makes no attempt to simply duplicate Errors, yet at the same time, he remains careful not to overemphasise his own contribution, since this would entail some kind of justification as to why another version of the play had become necessary, and thus risk being seen as a critique of Shakespeare. His published play-text amounts to what Bloom calls a clinamen, that is: a “corrective movement” that does not overtly contradict the precursor (Bloom 1975, 14). In his preface, Hull voices some degree of consternation at the fact that Shakespeare, whom he constantly places in small caps, offers [not] the slightest congratulation, or expression of delight between the parties [during the final scene]. To account for this, I have been apt to conjecture some small portion of the original text has been lost; for it appears rather improbable, that so nice and complete a master of the human heart, as shakespeare, should have restrained his genius, on such an interesting occasion. (Hull 1793/1971, A2) Were his source anyone else but Shakespeare, Hull might subject it to a proper critique, but he prefers to lay the blame on sloppy posthumous editing, thus casting himself as Shakespeare’s auxiliary rather than his adaptor. However, the play-text itself belies Hull’s initial statement that the only liberties he has taken with the text concern the erasure of “some old quibbles, or too frequent jingle, so unsuitable to our modern taste”

102  Appropriating Twins (ibid.), with the result that several passages are now “Hull undiluted by a word of Shakespeare” (Odell 1920, 46). In fact, many of his alterations betray an experienced man of the theatre who remains eager to ‘cut to the chase’ and who trims the fat accordingly: out with Egeon’s lengthy expository monologue, in with a more urgent dialogical passage, out with various digressions like the extended joke about Nell the kitchen-maid, as well as with most of Shakespeare’s rhymes. Indeed, Hull goes out of his way to substitute rhymes for blank-verse, as though he were hesitant to embrace the dualisms inherent in the play. In a note dated to 1774, Hull argues that the rhymes in Errors strike him as “most strange and unnatural,” but again, he exonerates Shakespeare, suggesting that the rhymes were only included “to please some reigning caprice in his days” (qtd. in Wells 1971, n.p.). This claim aligns him with Bloom’s category of tessera, where the later poet “provides what his imagination tells him would complete the otherwise ‘truncated’ precursor poem and poet, a ‘completion’ that is as much misprision as a revisionary swerve is” (Bloom 1975, 66). This is the Shakespearean infallibility dogma as outlined by Gary Taylor, and Hull’s bizarre logic was gladly lapped up by his contemporaries. In her introductory remarks to an early-nineteenth-century reprint of Hull’s version of Errors, Elizabeth Inchbald spins it into the theory that the play’s numerous improbabilities and clumsy rhymes had to be the fault of an unknown co-author (1808, 3). Evidently, the genius trope proves compatible with the collaborative nature of adaptation, as long as this absolves Shakespeare of alleged shortcomings. William Woods, whose three-act version superseded that of Hull, is not quite as apt at concealing his bewilderment at a play “clogged by Quibble, Rhyme, and even the grossest Indelicacy,” though he claims to have used “the Pruning-Knife only to make the Shoots of Genius spring forth more vigorously” (Woods 1780, iii–iv). Hull’s major ‘exorcisms’ are performed with an eye on sentimentality and in clear trepidation of the realm of the demonic that Shakespeare engages with throughout his play. He adds several lines in which Dromio swears to his honest heart, and he incorporates some verse from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as a song about the joys of fidelity in order to appease the marital strains. Most notably, he greatly revises the play’s final scene, with the result that parents and children now communicate directly with each other rather than by slave-surrogate, and Egeon and Emilia engage in a festive dialogue, shouting out their happiness and renewing their marriage vows on the spot: “take, take the reviving heart, / Spotless and pure as when it first was thine” (Hull 1793/1971, 49). Explicit stage directions now require the brothers to embrace and to emphasise their filial love (“Welcome, dearest brother!”, ibid.), and instead of the banter between the Dromios, some truisms voiced by Emilia ensure that the play “ends piously with a resounding platitude” (Wells 1971, n.p.).4 Hull also trims nearly all the speeches about devilish

Appropriating Twins  103 interference and sin, as well as Shakespeare’s bawdy allusions to venereal disease and direct invocations of God. If the “final” Quixote was, to Borges’s narrator, “a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces – faint but not indecipherable – of our friend’s ‘previous’ text must shine through” (Borges 1939/1998, 42), then Hull’s Comedy of Errors is proof that Shakespeare’s disciples can have their cake and eat it, disposing of the unwanted elements in a Shakespeare text not against, but with the assumed consent of the author, whose alleged ‘morality’ is inferred from his subsequent plays and projected back into a play that only few critics assume to be substantial or anything more than a youthful folly. When Hull wrote ‘his’ Comedy of Errors, the eighteenth century was in the process of discovering the quotation mark as “copyright writ small” (de Grazia 1991, 68), not just to show that something had been removed from its original context but also to turn a passage into a form of shared ‘wisdom,’ based on the cultural cachet of its author and on the “doxa effect of quotation [itself]” (Garber 2003, 20). This may account for why Hull and his contemporaries felt the need to ‘clear up’ the Shakespearean oeuvre. Garber argues that quotation always implies “a kind of cultural ventriloquism” and “an appropriation of authority” (2003, 16), which makes Hull’s Shakespeare a “textual revenant” (Desmet 2014, 46), the allegedly ‘faithful’ appropriation of the work resulting in the adaptor speaking through his Shakespeare puppet. Naturally, this comes with the territory: in the process of appropriation, understood as a kind of creative prenatal struggle in utero, one of the “verbal Siamese twins” must die, because either the speaker absorbs the voice of the other or s/he runs the risk of being, in turn, devoured (ibid. 45). This, too, is evidenced in the Charlie Kaufman-scripted Adaptation, and it does not concern the adaptor alone. Charlie appropriates Orlean’s book in order to give voice to his own vainglorious ramblings, while his twin brother, Donald, allows himself to be turned into a mouthpiece for the self-important lessons of screenwriting guru Robert McKee. Meanwhile, The Comedy of Errors was yet to go through quite a few more existential twin encounters, some of which came courtesy of the Hollywood adaptation industry.

Our Relations: “Take a Look Through That!” In the years leading up to Our Relations, their ninth feature-length vehicle, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had starred in a series of costume pieces, some of which were adapted from popular operettas, and interspersed their conventional plots with musical numbers and the duo’s well-rehearsed popular routines, generating situational humour from putting them into different habitats. Our Relations departs from this tested formula and, as the duo’s first feature film to be produced by Stan Laurel himself, is quite ambitious for a conventional slapstick comedy.

104  Appropriating Twins It arguably owes its dense plotting to two literary sources, one of them The Comedy of Errors, the other a 1903 story by W.W. Jacobs about a couple of sailors. This rather complex adaptation process is partly reflected in the credits, which state that the film was “suggested” by Jacobs’s story, while the “screen story” is credited to Richard Connell and Felix Adler, and its “adaptation” to Charles Rogers and Jack Jevne.5 It amounts to a family tree of increasing complexity that reflects the strict labour division customary in the studio system, preventing usurpers and illegitimate children from overthrowing the existing pecking order. At the same time, it amounts to adaptation as patchwork, not least because one of the gimmicks that Our Relations lifts from Jacobs’s short-story is money being sewn into the lining of a coat that is then pawned; a similar plot device features in Ilf and Petrov’s classic tale of The Twelve Chairs (1928). The credits of Our Relations also reflect what great lengths the Old Hollywood screenwriting industry went to in order to generate suitable material for its stars, especially if they were as productive as Laurel and Hardy, who constantly required fresh scripts; in the 1930s alone, the duo appeared in almost 50 films. The Comedy of Errors gets no mention in the credits, though the film is indebted to it no less than to the Jacobs story – then again, this is quite fitting, as the idea of hiding your family history and rewriting your lineage is a major theme of Our Relations. The whole process of ‘doubling up’ on the input, that is: of fusing two distinct literary properties into something that passes for a coherent whole resonates with the process of twinning itself and foreshadows what the film has to say on the matter. If Shakespeare is absent from the credits, he at least gets name-checked in the film. Repeatedly, Stan and Ollie ‘jinx it’ by saying the same thing at the same time, which sparks a curious verbal routine that runs like this in one sequence: “­Shakespeare – Longfellow – needles – pins,” thus positing Shakespeare as part of the counter-charm. The fact that they ‘jinx it’ repeatedly suggests that there is no less sorcery in the air than in Ephesus, and that spiritual bonds are not forged by genetic twinning alone; in fact, Stan and Ollie, who often come up with the same ideas and put them in the exact same words, share a bond that is even more pronounced than that of the film’s actual twin pairings. This idea is reinforced by the climax of the film, where the two comedians, their feet stuck in bowls of cement, reel around helplessly in an attempt not to fall off the docks, as though they were trying to embody Plato’s original idea of the “spherical creatures” whom Zeus cut in half, and whom Plato himself, it is worth noting, likens to “acrobats” – in other translations: clowns – “who perform cartwheels”, wheeling “over and over in a circle with their eight limbs” (2008, 190a). Stan and Ollie try their best to hold on to one another, but the rules of the slapstick genre deny their claims for stability – it is only when they finally grab each other by their jackets that they tumble into the water.

Appropriating Twins  105 Our Relations is not the first time that Laurel and Hardy riff on the notion of reduplicating themselves, having swapped personalities as a result of a blood transfusion in Thicker Than Water (1935), having played infant versions of ‘Stan’ and ‘Ollie’ in Brats (1930) and female ones in the suggestively titled Twice Two (1933). The latter sees Stan and Ollie marry into each other’s family, as though to illustrate the set-up of LéviStrauss’s elementary kinship systems. Though it pursues a similar argument on the glue that holds society together, Our Relations is the only film in which they are reduplicated to appear as identical twins, acting the parts of respectably married husbands who are well-adjusted to the domestic arrangements of their middle-class existence. On learning that their respective twin brothers, sailors Alf and Bert, are believed to have died in a sea mutiny, they decide to keep the black sheep of their respective families a secret from their wives and everyone else: “We’d lose our prestige in town and be ostracised by the rest of the community,” Ollie explains. The plot does not make any excuses for its central gimmick, never bothering with explanations that even Shakespeare touches upon at least perfunctorily before allowing his play to submit to the farcical energy of its conceit. The viewer never learns how Stan/Ollie and Alf/ Bert have ended up in neat symmetry as two homosocial pairings; in fact, if they did not carry their customary surnames, the viewer might be encouraged to believe them to be one big family. Neither is a reasonable explanation given as to why the wives seem to be unaware of their husbands’ twins to begin with. The two sailors are, of course, not only alive and well, their ship also happens to go ashore in Stan and Ollie’s hometown, with various complications ensuing. The set-up manages to merge the premises of both its literary sources by virtue of its two central bonds: money and a ring. The former comes from Jacobs’s short-story, where the two sailors hand over their pay to a trusted colleague for safe-keeping – sailors, the story’s first sentence informs us, “are not good ’ands at saving money as a rule” (Jacobs 1903). Soon, however, they want a drink and try everything to get the money back. The ring, on the other hand, comes from the Shakespeare play, where the Courtesan gives it to Antipholus of Ephesus, only to have his twin brother deny any knowledge of the transaction; the scandalous proposition that the ring might end up on the finger of a disrespectable woman is echoed in the beer-garden sequence: Alf ponders the ring in an extreme close-up until his gaze is diverted by the two ‘floozies’ at the nearby table. The amount of confusion is no match for Shakespeare’s five-act farce: unlike in The Comedy of Errors, the four men are perfectly aware of their brothers’ existence, and because the film dares not separate its central duo, there is only so much misunderstanding that can happen between them. But like in The Comedy of Errors, Stan and Ollie find themselves accused of adultery, theft, and bilking, with the ring ending up in the wrong man’s hands – and pants. It is not the film’s

106  Appropriating Twins only debt to its unacknowledged literary sources. Laurel, when he finally comes face to face with his brother, timidly pays him a rather narcissistic compliment (“You’re sure looking good, Stanley.”) that echoes how Dromio compliments himself by flattering his genetic copy: “I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth” (Shakespeare 1594/2008, 5.1.420). Moreover, Our Relations hints at the same latent domestic troubles that undercut Shakespeare’s happy ending. In The Comedy of Errors, Luciana cannot believe that the man whom she takes to be her brother-­ in-law starts coming on to her, and when the wives of Stan and Ollie accidentally bail their husbands’ twins out of jail, they are shocked at being kissed by the ‘wrong’ husband. The twisted logic propelling their romantic conquests is a succinct caricature of the ‘first come, first served’ logic that permeates the marriage contracts of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1592), where Bianca can only marry once her undesirable elder sister is taken care of. Bert, not knowing that he is standing in front of his sister-in-law, warns Alf to “lay off of the blonde, I saw her first,” and picks the wrong wife because she looks more similar to him. Both The Comedy of Errors and its slapstick adaptation are smart enough not to resolve such disturbances into complete harmony. While much of the twin trouble is cleared up in the final scene, Antipholus of Ephesus does cheat on his wife, albeit with a prostitute and not with his sister-in-law, and happily married Stan ­absent-mindedly kisses the wrong wife even before his twin appears on the scene, thus hinting at his subliminal, libidinous desires. The film’s indebtedness to the Shakespeare play may be part of the reason why neither diehard Laurel and Hardy fans nor critics have ever fully embraced Our Relations. The film is “so intricately plotted” that “there isn’t room left for them to develop their best leisurely routines” (Barr 1968, 96), and the filmic texture differs from the duo’s trademark visual style.6 Moreover, Our Relations is not as devoted to the existential spirit of falling and persisting that characterises the slapstick choreographies of their most acclaimed work, and, in spite of a prolonged ‘tit for tat’ sequence in which the duo exchange blows with their eternal nemesis, James Finlayson, it is rather light on their usual set-pieces. The film may thus neglect Laurel and Hardy’s usual comic techniques, but it still clings to their well-established personas: the duo’s regular character dynamic of the stern, bossy one who always beats the allegedly more clumsy, dim-witted one over the head, arguably makes for a natural fit with the Antipholus/Dromio double-act of The Comedy of Errors or, indeed, with any of the classic master/slave pairings that Shakespeare himself adapted from the Romans. The film thus fuses the dramaturgy necessitated by Shakespearean farce with the conventions of slapstick, perfunctory as some of the chasing, pie-throwing, and clothes-­ ripping may be.

Appropriating Twins  107 The duo’s on-screen personas are so strong as to effectively resist some of the requirements of twin farce, most notably the yin/yang dynamic of supplementarity that not only propels Shakespeare’s play, where Antipholus of Syracuse is the reflective, melancholic inversion of his Bakhtinian, skirt-chasing brother, but also many of its stage successors. Our Relations, by contrast, succumbs to the mighty weight of the Laurel/ Hardy brand and establishes the identical twin pairings not as supplements but as virtual carbon copies of one another. Each of the many re-births which occurs in slapstick cinema – man, in a distorted re-­ enactment of the original fall, stumbles and gets up again – only reproduces an exact duplicate. When Alf, in a scene somewhat reminiscent of the stateroom sequence in A Night at the Opera (1935), tumbles out of an overturned phone-booth, milk having spilled all over his face, we can be certain that this symbolic re-birth will leave him none the worse or better for his experience. Stan and Ollie, acting the roles of respectable citizens, may wrinkle their noses at the idea of ever running into the two disreputable sailors with whom they share a genetic bond, but the film does not sustain this logic. The two Laurels are not only each other’s spitting image, they are also equally clumsy and whiny, while the two Hardys are both bossy and self-important. Telling the brothers apart with certainty becomes possible only in context, by keeping track of costumes and musical cues: Stan and Ollie’s appearances are announced by the duo’s trademark tune, “Dance of the Cuckoos,” while “The Sailor’s Hornpipe” is used as the leitmotif for their brothers. What else is the film to do when there is neither a difference in character nor in performance? At least on the surface, it suggests that genetic forces must produce absolute identicals in every respect. Ambiguities remain, though, as the film never clarifies at what point the two twin pairs lost sight of each other and thus became drawn into the two supplementary Stan/Ollie relationships. Regarding the visual illusion of the twins’ physical co-presence in the same scene, Our Relations does not aim for great verisimilitude. There are a number of scenes where the two pairs narrowly miss each other and a few where the embodied pun is provided by having one pair act against background projections of themselves. The dénouement resorts to Stan and Ollie conversing and shaking hands with their out-of-shot body doubles, and the scene is mercifully cut short just when the continuity goes out the window and the point-of-view directions do not match anymore (Fig. 4.1). Such in-camera tricks have been pulled off more successfully in big-budget productions, and they have been rendered nearly obsolete in the digital era. These days, Tom Hardy can easily fight ‘himself’ when he plays both of the Kray twins in Legend (2015). The cinematic frame clearly imposes limitations when it comes to accommodating all four of the brothers, and this resonates with the plot

108  Appropriating Twins

Fig. 4.1  Off-screen body doubles indicate twinship (Our Relations).

conundrums that Stan and Ollie are presented with. As one of many plot devices to put the duo through yet another series of mishaps, the twin gimmick in Our Relations is exploited for all kinds of misunderstandings before symmetry, or rather the usual (dis-)equilibrium of their fragile relationship can be restored again. Within this structural arithmetic, the appearance of twins is less a case of ‘plus two’ than ‘times two,’ as the co-presence of two twin pairs adds the operation of multiplication to that of summation, ‘two times two’ introducing the possibility of exponentiation and thus an abyss of chaos that needs to be contained. As Alf and Bert, in an episode taken almost verbatim from Jacobs’s short-story, try to work out the logistics of how to pawn another man’s clothes when they only have one pair of clothes at their disposal, the number of possible solutions soon exceeds the limits of their imagination. It is only with the ‘tit for tat’ logic of cumulative beatings that they find themselves on home turf again, as Finlayson, having been humiliated by Stan and Ollie, shows up with two cronies to have his revenge: “Before, it was two to one. Now it’s three to two. That makes it even”. Several slapstick staples in Our Relations paraphrase the visual spectacle afforded by the climactic confrontations of Shakespeare’s twin plays, where the characters tend to mistrust their eyesight: “I see two husbands, or mine eyes deceive me”, says Adriana (5.1.332). One is the film’s repeated use of the double-take, a comedic technique perfected and trademarked by Finlayson (Fig. 4.2). Typically, the double-take consists of a character gazing at an off-screen object without paying full attention, directing their attention elsewhere, only to return their gaze abruptly to the object once it has dawned on them that they have seen something bewildering. Each of the five double-takes in the film occurs when a character sees both twin pairs in quick succession, the delayed reaction offering a humorous distortion of mental processes. The same inability to accommodate ‘double vision’ permeates other sight gags that recur throughout the film. When trying to read a letter

Appropriating Twins  109

Fig. 4.2  Repeated use of the double-take (Our Relations).

addressed to him, Ollie asks Stan to clean his glasses for him, but the latter accidentally cracks them and hands the empty frame, minus the lenses, back to Ollie. Neither of them notices the mishap straightaway, with the effect that Ollie puts a glass-less frame on his nose. As he always believes himself the more clear-sighted one of the two, this does not keep him from chastising Stan for allegedly failing to recognise his twin in a photograph: “How do you know that’s you?”, he asks Stan, thus presenting his friend with the straightforward philosophical question that permeates all twin narratives. Another almost philosophical running gag is the ‘take a look through that’ routine that Finlayson introduces in the beer-garden sequence. Having formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger, he invites the two buffoons to take a look through it as if it were a peep-hole (or, indeed, a camera-eye) and proceeds to withdraw his hand, knocking their heads against each other (Fig. 4.3). Stan, attempting to reproduce the prank later on, accidentally knocks his own head against that of a bartender because he fails to understand that it requires two suckers instead of one. The gag highlights one of the paradoxes of seeing: that in order to visualise one thing with spatial depth, the brain requires the combined perceptions of two eyes. Squinting through the imaginary hole with one eye is often seen as a gesture of precision – think of the scientist

110  Appropriating Twins

Fig. 4.3  “  Take a look through that!” Stan and Ollie get duped (Our Relations).

looking through his microscope, or the camera-man looking through his eyepiece – but in fact it reduces a person’s capacity of getting the full, multi-dimensional picture. Finlayson’s trick thus literalises the dupe’s inability to see in the sense favoured by the farcical dénouement: “I see we still did meet each other’s man”, says Antipholus of Syracuse when facing his twin (5.1.388), and when he sees, he understands. Alf, Stan’s identical twin, will later fall victim to the same trick, yet he continues to look through the circle in utter bemusement, as if it still owed him its secret. It is an inversion of the film’s adaptation policy: take a look through the prism expecting some miracle and you get nothing; yet take a look through the adaptive prism of the film expecting nothing – and you get Shakespeare.

Big Business: A Mirror to the Adaptation Industry Big Business, released by the Disney-owned Buena Vista Pictures in 1988, remains the only adaptation of The Comedy of Errors to re-­ imagine the four siblings as women. This makes it a cinematic rarity insofar as the film opens up the otherwise exclusively male domain of twin farce to female protagonists. Outside of the various big-screen adaptations of Lottie and Lisa (1949), Erich Kästner’s young-adult novel about two adolescent twin girls who switch places in order to reunite their divorced parents,7 female identical twins tend to feature more prominently in horror and suspense films like Twins of Evil (1971), Sisters (1973), The Shining (1980), Let Her Out (2016), Look Away (2018), and Us (2019). Big Business was the first Hollywood film to take on The Comedy of Errors in more than half a century, but it neither references the previous adaptation nor the Shakespearean source. However, it might be more than just a coincidence that the film recycles the title of one of the most well-known Laurel/Hardy comedies, Big Business of 1929. While the earlier silent film, a 20-minute orgy of escalating destructiveness and one of the quintessential ‘tit for tat’ films, has no connection to the Shakespeare play, both films poke fun at the dehumanising aspects of capitalism: Big Business of 1988 adjusts Shakespearean farce to 1980s

Appropriating Twins  111 Reaganomics, while Big Business of 1929, released six months before the big stock market crash, sees Laurel and Hardy get into an existential and increasingly violent battle with James Finlayson when their business venture, selling Christmas trees in the middle of the Californian summer, fails. Like the Laurel and Hardy comedies of the 1930s, Big Business starring Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler comes up with various strategies of adjusting the material to the dominant personas of its two stars, and like the Laurel/Hardy version, it references neither the Plautine nor the Shakespearean source. This indicates a somewhat uneasy relationship with Shakespeare in particular, one that Adaptation Studies does not often acknowledge. While an affiliation with Shakespearean drama often lends much cachet to a cultural product, this kind of cachet is not deemed equally desirable in all cases. Shakespeare is a cultural commodity, but one that does not immediately translate into box-office gold. Modern-day revamps of Shakespearean comedies, including 10 Things I Hate about You (1999) or She’s the Man (2006), were not advertised as Shakespeare adaptations, presumably so as not to scare off their target teenage audiences with a cultural label that smacks of canonical literature and English class. Rather than deliver a ‘celebration’ of the text and thus allow the canonical source to overpower the actual adaptation (see Leitch 2007, 96–98), these are ‘recompositions’ of classical texts, contemporary spins that bring together “two disparate cultures” (ibid. 105). By the same token, the paratextual framework of Big Business never invokes the classics, yet at the same time, it is very much indebted to tropes of Ancient and Elizabethan comedy, leaving room for musical interludes and ‘fun with a dog.’ The colonial prehistory between the two mutually co-dependent, transatlantic siblings Great Britain and the United States further complicates matters. It is tempting to trace some of this colonial baggage in the Shakespeare-inspired narrative of the successful, well-­respected citizen put to shame by the arrival of a provincial family member who is normally an ocean away, but this is not borne out by the film itself: in place of the Syracuse/Ephesus divide, Big Business features not the duality of Britain and the United States, but that of rural periphery (West Virginia) and urban centre (the Big Apple). Big Business of 1988 substitutes the Antipholi and the Dromios for sisters Ratliff and Shelton, played by Midler and Tomlin in dual roles, but it does not abandon the source text’s satirical take on patriarchy. Midler in particular turns in a performance full of masculine swagger as the alpha female spearheading her family’s business conglomerate. The film reunites her with director Jim Abrahams, who had directed Midler in the successful black farce, Ruthless People (1986), but the second collaboration failed to reproduce that film’s success, in spite of being a much more family-friendly affair. On paper, Abrahams would have sounded like the appropriate choice for a twin farce, seeing as he

112  Appropriating Twins specialised in genre-busting parodies such as Airplane! (1980) or Hot Shots! (1991), the mean-spirited, inverted twins of melodramatic, pompous crowd-pleasers. Compared to the anarchic spirit of Abrahams’s other films, Big Business is a tame affair, settling as it does for the rather conventional shenanigans of family farce and a ‘fish out of water’ plot, outdoing the romantic and conjugal ambitions of Shakespeare’s climax in the process. All four sisters are paired with a love interest to cover the whole spectrum of the traditional, heteronormative courtship plot – flirting, dating, settling down, and parenting. This even results in one sister ending up in the arms of her twin’s ex-husband and thus as a likely step-mother to her own nephew, a somewhat disturbing variation on the ‘bed-trick’ that the twin motif is so often affiliated with. Unlike most other existing versions of Plautus’s Menaechmi, Big Business attempts to ‘fix’ the Aristotelian failures of the story, namely the two outrageous coincidences at its heart: the identical naming of the twins and their unlikely meeting in the same location. It does so by coming up with a story device meant to satisfy the causality clause dictated by the conventions of Hollywood screenwriting, and introducing a ‘switchedat-birth’ plot gimmick to clear up both of the inherited plot-holes. While on a drive through the countryside, a millionaire’s wife goes into labour and is rushed into hospital in the town of Jupiter Hollow, where a hick couple has also just checked in; both women then give birth to twin girls. The economic divide between the two families is illustrated by a number of sight gags, as well as by the quite different reactions of the two fathers on hearing the news of the multiple births. “Wonderful,” says the millionaire; “damn,” says the labourer who already has five mouths to feed. Two illegitimate appropriations set the scene for the subsequent farcical confusion: an elderly nurse’s mistake ensures that each couple ends up with one child of their own and one ‘cuckoo’s egg,’ and the hick couple ‘plagiarise’ the names that the rich have given to their daughters, thus neatly introducing the problem of illegitimate appropriation and of branding into a Disney movie. This story kernel also provides an explanation for why the four women run into each other 40 years later. In order to get his wife into Jupiter Hollow’s clinic, which is reserved for employees of the local furniture maker, Shelton Snr, simply buys the whole company. It remains part of the family business until Sadie, having taken over from her father, attempts to get rid of it several decades later. But before the Sheltons can cut the umbilical cord of their shameful family secret, their provincial place of birth, the Ratliffs come to New York City to interfere on behalf of the local population, substituting the ancient shipwreck trope with the looming corporate takeover. The constellation makes use of one of the decade’s habitual plot devices, as used in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), whose iconic villain Gordon Gekko (“Greed is good.”) is emulated in Bette Midler’s performance as the head of ‘Moramax.’ The latter might just be a nod to the film company

Appropriating Twins  113 Miramax: founded in 1979 by two notorious alpha-male siblings, the Weinstein brothers, Miramax had gathered some steam throughout the 1980s and was eventually swallowed by Disney in the early 1990s. This subtext about small businesses being forced into uneasy alliances with big capital and the economics of family relations haunts the whole film, right from the prologue, which reveals that the millionaire has bribed his wife with real estate and jewellery to agree to having children and to give them the names he has selected. Sadie Shelton, the pair’s biological child, takes naturally to this ‘dog eat dog’ environment; her pseudo-twin, however, does not, and it quickly becomes clear that the two misplaced women are suffering from acute phantom pains. While Sadie Ratliff, who has erroneously ended up in small-town America, cannot help but dream of designer clothes and lodging in penthouses, Rose Shelton remains completely out of her depth in board meetings and would rather lead a quiet life with “a goat and some ducks,” which provokes her more aggressive, man-eating ‘sister’ Sadie to take her to task over her “weird attacks of domesticity.” By contrast, the two women who have been brought up by their biological parents have adapted much more successfully to their environment. Rose Ratliff is a beloved and active member of her small-town community, while Sadie Shelton serves as the cold-blooded, utterly materialistic chairwoman of the family conglomerate who becomes sexually aroused when she negotiates business deals. The film’s implication that there is “such a thing as a genetic yuppy [sic]” (Williamson 1991, 152) places it firmly on the side of the ‘nature’ camp, though details on the supplementary aspects of the sibling relationship are scarce. The structural chiasm results in a paradoxical character constellation, which means that out of all the possible pairings, the two respective ultimate ‘others,’ who share neither genes nor environment – the two alpha females and the two submissive ‘Dromios’ – emerge as the most ‘naturally’ alike women. At the same time, the biological subtext of the film repeatedly underlines that individuals must be placed in their natural habitat in order to be ‘productive,’ that is: to procreate. The idea of the split and the characters’ ongoing efforts to achieve wholeness inform not only various farcical scenes of the twins narrowly missing each other in restaurants and hotel corridors, they also extend to the film’s dénouement. The moment of recognition comes when the four sisters use the same hotel bathroom, and the two Sadies face each other, believing their twin to be their mirror image (Fig. 4.4). This leads to a wordless re-enactment of the famous mirror routine in Duck Soup (1933),8 where Groucho Marx faces Harpo, dressed up as his double, and strikes increasingly bizarre poses to assert his authority over the disobedient ‘mirror image’ – a scene that has invited more psychoanalytic interpretations than possibly any other sequence in the history of screen comedy (see Flaig 2011).

114  Appropriating Twins

Fig. 4.4  T he two Sadies confront each other in the bathroom (Big Business).

Big Business is not the first adaptation of Errors to riff on the mirror gag. The BBC adaptation of 1983 inserts a similar visual pun into the first Act and has the two Dromios bump into each other at the market, believing the other man to be their mirror image, until both run off in shock when the reflection is out of sync. Shakespeare himself invokes the mirror as a metaphor when one of his two Dromios muses that the newly found twin must be “my glass and not my brother” (5.1.419), and he in turn already inherits it from Plautus, who has Messenio the slave recognise his master’s “reflection” in the latter’s twin (Plautus 1996, v. 1062). Unlike Shakespeare, though, Plautus exploits the joke to an extent which suggests that he may have been a Lacanian avant la lettre, for while Shakespeare’s twins accept the existence of their carbon copies, Menaechmus II insists that he sees only “similarities,” but no complete identity (ibid. v. 1064), thus clinging to the Lacanian subject position of remaining completely fixated in the realm of the Imaginary: “[the original narcissist] thinks there is no-one there but himself, when actually there is someone else, the supposed mirror image being another person. Here he is trapped within an infinite mise en abîme, locked into a conflict with infinitely proliferating doubles of the self” (Doniger 2000, 102). Since Lacanian subjectivity dictates that “I experience myself as the absolute singularity of a subject” while, at the same time, “recognizing myself in the mirror image” and thus “encountering my virtual double,” there simply “is no Ego without its clone double” (Žižek 2000, 315). Martin Esslin, in his scorching assessment of Joe Orton’s farcical plays, suggests that they amount to “no more than an idiot’s giggle at his own image in a mirror” (1981, 107), but the metaphor surely misses the

Appropriating Twins  115 point – in farce, the look in the mirror never affords narcissistic pleasure, but leads to outright horror. Out of all the adaptations of Errors, Big Business makes the most extensive use of the routine, and thus facilitates a surreal climax during which the two Sadies attempt to assert their autonomy by wincing, grimacing, pulling faces, blowing raspberries, and wiggling their breasts, until one of them breaks the illusion by reaching out to the other side. It is fitting that the two Sadies should experience the mirror dilemma, as they most closely resemble Lacan’s original narcissist of the mirror stage, who must fight the “third term [that] interrupts the binary of ego consolidation”, the added complication being, of course, that the third term here “erupts as identical to the first two” (Flaig 2011, 106). The two Sadies are utterly shocked by their uncanny encounter, starting an orgy of screaming which lasts nearly half a minute and which various bystanders get involved in. While yuppie Sadie quips about the inferior quality of the copy and thus, like Menaechmus, takes comfort in the differences between her and the provincial knock-off (“My god, it’s me with a bad haircut!”), her small-town twin sees only the similarities embodied by her desired other and seeks an explanation in the doppelganger fantasies of popular culture: “It’s pod people, I saw that movie!” She is thinking of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), the post-Watergate update of a 1950s horror fantasy in which the American population is gradually replaced with zombie-like alien doppelgangers. While the story, in its original context, primarily played up Cold War fears about a Communist invasion, the 1970s and 1980s saw it gradually transform into a parabolic story about capitalism’s dehumanising effects and the commodification of everyday life; an effective allegory of processes that Adorno and Horkheimer investigated in their work on the culture industry: “Something is provided for all so that none may escape” (Adorno/Horkheimer 1944/2013, 331). In one of Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ most iconic scenes – the one that is on Sadie’s mind when she comes face to face with her biological twin – Donald Sutherland experiences the inversion of ‘vanishing twin’ syndrome upon waking up next to his own, foetus-like doppelganger, fresh born from a pod. He proceeds to hack up his double with an axe, in a desperate attempt to stop the colonisation that has gradually taken over the entire local population. Yet the alien sect closes in on him, and presents him with an argument that will resurface in the biological subtext of Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation: resistance is futile, because “we adapt, and we survive. The function of life is survival”. Big Business plays on similar anxieties and trumpets its leftist subtext even louder than Body Snatchers, starting with the title. Sadie Ratliff in particular clearly ‘doth protest too much,’ for she, more than anyone else in the film, is repeatedly shown to be desirous of becoming one of the pod people and of partaking in the commodities of the big city,

116  Appropriating Twins rather than resisting them. She is infatuated with TV-inspired fantasies of glamour and fashion, is far more willing than Rose to be swept away and corrupted by big corporate money, and stares longingly at window displays and exquisitely dressed New York women. This is not just twinship as the embodiment of “the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ facets of business,” as Judith Williamson suggests (1991, 151); it is a pun on the ambiguity of adaptation itself: a business takeover that attempts to dissolve the family lineage into a profitable venture, at the expense of individual character. The fact that Big Business’s discourse level of cinematic representation is so completely in line with this agenda ultimately absorbs the film’s critical subtext. The co-presence of multiple actors with their doubles has come a long way since the limited trickery of Our Relations, and there is little in the rather seamless mise-en-scène to suggest much of a split of any kind. The film’s glamorous surface underlines the way in which Big Business seeks to drum up exactly the kind of ‘big business’ that will draw an audience, a process that involves the Hollywood star system, which Adorno and Horkheimer characterise as indispensable in the culture industry’s attempts to diminish “the tension between finished product and everyday life” (1944/2013, 334). The film’s subtext constantly runs the risk of exposing this agenda, particularly during the climax, as the Ratliffs, having switched places with the Sheltons, step up during a board meeting in order to convince the stockholders with an almost Lacanian pep talk that the conglomerate must hold on to its provincial other because of an “image problem” (!). It is up to the climactic family reconciliation to gloss over all the fissures, pair off the twins with their love interests, and thus go with the Shakespearean resolution – tellingly, though, the sisterly embrace is still missing. Moving on to versions of Errors which come with their own ‘family baggage’ and with a colonial genealogy, we can see that the split is similarly noticeable in other adaptations.

Transcultural Family Reunions Angoor (1982), one of several Bollywood adaptations of The Comedy of Errors (see Allen 2014), starts with simple mathematics. The credit sequence duplicates the head of its lead actor, Sanjeev Kumar, in a manner akin to cell division, and repeats the exercise several times until there are 16 heads on the screen, which subsequently come together like a cluster of grapes, as if to illustrate the literal meaning of the movie title. The remainder of the credits extends the idea of messing with the characters’ heads, as it superimposes them over one another, dissects them, and pastes parts of them together, before it eventually re-­establishes the correct proportion in a grape-coloured egg from which two twins hatch (Fig. 4.5). Evidently, the film’s credits bring together grapes and eggs to suggest similarity, as is borne out by food idioms in a variety

Appropriating Twins  117

Fig. 4.5  B  ack to the egg (Angoor).

of languages, and they playfully assert that, once planted, the seed will take root, grow, and multiply. The idea of looking for one’s roots permeates all versions of The Comedy of Errors, but it acquires a particular significance in the context of (post-)colonial and transcultural adaptation, which I have discussed in more detail elsewhere (see Schwanebeck 2019). Adaptation always implies a degree of colonisation insofar as progenitor texts serve as “vessels to be filled with new meanings” (Leitch 2007, 109), and it is up to the individual adaptation to either camouflage this endeavour or to flaunt it. Angoor chooses the latter path and directly acknowledges its intertextual debt to the Shakespeare play, repeatedly alluding to the theme of illegitimate appropriation, which has a very distinct flavour, given the history of Anglo-Indian relations and British imperialism. Though critics who investigate the long tradition of Hindi Shakespeare films emphasise that these are rarely subversive postcolonial endeavours, Angoor emphasises that Shakespeare’s story is not only that of a happy family reunion several decades in the making, but also that of a foreign ‘intruder’ who is grudgingly granted a place at the family table. Transcultural adaptations always come with their own migration history, and their reception can often be read in terms of xenophobic prejudices against the Other. After all, could the idea of adaptation-as-illegitimate-appropriation be any more pronounced than in the implicit suggestion that the adaptor is an interloper who comes from far away, who ‘steals’ things that are not his, and who usurps existing structures in order to fill them with his own values and traditions? And could this be better subverted than by revealing the intruder to be an actual, unacknowledged family member? That the film, right from the beginning, attempts to establish some degree of Shakespearean authority in the first place is remarkable. Usually, it is the American film industry that accuses Bollywood of plagiarising and of camouflaging its sources, especially when one of their blockbusters has been ‘ripped off.’ The kind of ‘unacknowledged remaking’

118  Appropriating Twins Bollywood frequently engages in serves an important purpose, of course. Not only does it modify the traditional understanding of remaking as an industrial category, it can also be read as a subversive practice that explicitly refutes the Western (capitalist) paradigm of originality and innovation (see Krämer 2015). Angoor foregoes this path of resistance and never cuts the umbilical cord with Shakespeare, relying on a curious mixture of updating and reiterating his plot. Before he decides to adopt the two Bahadurs, Raj Tilak is already convinced his sons are “the children from The Comedy of Errors,” and he suspects his wife of accidentally feeding one brother twice and leaving the other one hungry. The parents’ lack of certainty in establishing the identity of their children serves as a justification strategy to retain Shakespeare’s bizarre naming, as Tilak explains to his wife that it makes no sense to give the children different names as long as they look identical. The film exhibits this kind of wit at various points. On hearing that his brother has no mole on his shoulder, Ashok concludes that this means they must be twins, for neither has he. If Tilak, with his thick glasses, is unable or even unwilling to distinguish between the twins, then the same goes for the other family members. References to seeing and flawed vision abound throughout the film: Ashok’s sister-in-law wears glasses, and Sudha, his wife, hears about his alleged madness while taking her eye medicine, which gives her a look somewhat reminiscent of Stan Laurel staring through the imaginary ocular in Our Relations, as she struggles to make sense of twoness with only one eye. Meanwhile, the visiting Ashok is introduced as a lover of detective novels whose voracious reading severely affects his grasp on reality; at one point, he accidentally threatens his own mirror image with an imaginary gun (Fig. 4.6). In formal terms, Angoor is a Bollywood homage to Shakespearean comedy which simultaneously denounces a number of Bollywood tropes (Chakravarti 2015, 232–233), most notably so when Sudha serenades Ashok with a seductive song, but all that registers on his face is boredom.

Fig. 4.6  I mpaired vision (Angoor).

Appropriating Twins  119 The film thus prefigures some of the debate surrounding British films that came under fire for appropriating and ‘whitewashing’ Indian culture, including Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) – Angoor’s director, Gulzar, won an Academy Award for having co-written “Jai Ho,” the latter’s popular theme song. Tellingly, Ashok, whose struggle to maintain a facade of respectability and to adapt to British standards is evidenced by his white garments, disapproves of the jeweller addressing him in Urdu and opts at various points to incorporate English lexemes and phrases into his Hindi diction. He struggles to retain his authority over his servant and is abhorred by the democratising effects of intoxication. Unlike, say, the paternal configuration of colonial hierarchy propagated by the British Raj, the ‘fraternity’ model suggested by Gitanjali Shahani and Brinda Charry (2014, 163) is a more progressive approach to assessing Angoor’s adaptation politics, but its implied egalitarianism does not do justice to the film’s unresolved tensions. Some of the concluding trick shots may put the twins into the same frame to facilitate a kind of “re-bonding of the split self” (ibid. 175), but the invisible demarcation line between them remains, thus re-­emphasising the inherently split condition of twinship and, in a wider sense, of subjectivity. Fittingly, the almost speechless montage that leads up to the twin reunion reiterates the idea of isolation and confrontation. From the moment that Ashok and Bahadur enter the house as though they had been conjured via a magic door, the viewer is treated to a succession of disjointed close-ups, cut together much more rapidly than any other sequence in the film. The dominant mode of twinned representation thus remains determined by the idea of the split, even more so than in Big Business, suggesting that Angoor’s ending is nowhere near as clear-cut as its conciliatory nods to Shakespeare indicate. Another structural sign of this are the film’s numerous song interludes, which repeatedly disrupt the linearity of the plot, though other adaptations of The Comedy of Errors have used and appropriated music to quite different ends. The first ever Broadway show to be based on a Shakespeare play, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (1938) strikes a balance between the plot-mindedness of farce and the necessarily disrupted structure of the musical revue,9 supplementing the convoluted plot with some of the duo’s most well-known songs. Only one of them riffs on the notion of twinship: “I Had Twins”, essentially the Shakespearean exposition condensed into one musical number, has Egeon relate his family’s history to the Duke of Ephesus. Nearly all of Egeon’s lines circle around a simple motif in C major which is echoed, or rather twinned, by a solo clarinet (Fig. 4.7). The piece is somewhat reminiscent of “Dance of the Cuckoos,” Laurel and Hardy’s signature theme – both tunes, at least in their original arrangements, make use of the same mocking clarinet and employ the same pattern: that of a simple, clownish tune consisting of several parts, all of which are played twice.

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Fig. 4.7  M  usical twinning in The Boys from Syracuse (Rodgers/Hart/Abbott 1965, 21).

Reduplication and repetition may well be the most obvious artistic strategies of twinning. Innocuous as the mere gesture of repetition may appear, the question of who is doing the repeating comes prominently into play within the deeply politicised context of cultural appropriation. The Bomb-itty of Errors (Allen-Dutton et al. 1999/2010) is a case in point: its creators adapt the Shakespeare play into a fast-paced hip-hop extravaganza written for four performers and one on-stage DJ who lays down the beats for the actors. As a hip-hop musical, The Bomb-itty derives from a tradition very much shaped by the underdog perspective of disenfranchised African-American artists protesting against white mainstream culture, often by way of sampling and remixing material, in a spirit of subversion similar to Bollywood’s ‘unacknowledged remaking’ of white, Anglo-American cultural properties. Typically, black culture is then in turn appropriated by the white mainstream, as record companies sign African-American hip-hop artists and commodify their ‘gangsta’ attitudes. The Bomb-itty of Errors is indicative of that type of covert colonisation of a subcultural phenomenon: none of the four creators is African-American, but this does not stop The Bomb-itty from riffing on the respective clichés. Here, the two pairs of twins are quadruplets, as if to caricature the stereotypical fertility of people who are of African descent; Egeon is forced by economic hardship to turn criminal, and he dies in prison. His four children end up in foster homes, with the Antipholi enslaving their respective Dromios as their back-up MCs: “And so it was the Dromios were treated like crap crap / Having to sing back-up on Antipholus’ rap rap” (Allen-Dutton et al. 1999/2010, 11). This kind of appropriation has rather straightforward legal implications. The published play-text comes with a full page that explains licensing fees and that programmes and adverts for the play must name the publisher. While no mention is made of Shakespeare in this legal

Appropriating Twins  121 paratext, The Bomb-itty is characterised “[as] malleable and open to interpretation and re-imagination […] as Shakespeare’s work” in the author’s notes, a claim somewhat hard to substantiate, seeing as the script is declared to be “the ultimate authority on lyrics” in the same breath (ibid. 6). The only room for alteration left in the script comes in the form of a four-page appendix that is provided in order to extend the play’s business prospects. It contains substitute lines for some of the juicier lyrics, offering “an erotic massage” instead of “sex behind a dumpster” or “flyin’ in the sky” instead of “getting high,” similar to how Thomas Hull exorcised some of Shakespeare’s bawdier and potentially blasphemous puns. But unlike Hull’s adaptation, The Bomb-itty of Errors goes for an excess of rhyme as befits a play about quadruplets who share two names between them, with the result that the play, from which Hull had attempted to let out some air, is now re-inflated, and then some. The Bomb-itty effectively ‘outShakespeares’ Shakespeare similar to how Shakespeare ‘outPlautused’ Plautus (Taylor 1990, 396), and it squeezes in a number of additional appropriations in the process. Hip-hop clichés and various ethnic stereotypes abound, the players are required to don ‘pimp’ items like gold chains and sunglasses, the goldsmith is recast as a Jewish MC, while the character of Dr. Pinch is re-imagined as a Rastafarian witch doctor whose obscure, voodoo-inspired spells are constantly misunderstood. The Bomb-itty is not short on gimmicks and spectacular effects either, incorporating beat-boxing, spinning record sounds, ‘thy momma’ jokes, freestyle ad lib sections, break-dance performances, audience interaction, an on-stage basketball game, and a parody of chase sequences that includes running in slow-motion. Clearly, The Bomb-itty of Errors throws in everything but the kitchen sink, which is not without risk – if appropriation is all about devouring one cultural property, this play is utterly gluttonous.

Adaptation: Two Can Play at That Game The most explicit literalisation of adaptation’s gluttony and tendency towards absorption of its unacknowledged twin(s) comes courtesy of Adaptation, a meta-reflexive account of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s attempt to adapt Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief for the screen. In the film, Kaufman, a chubby loner with a receding hairline and severe anxiety issues, who feels utterly out of place with commercial Hollywood filmmaking, becomes entangled in the lives of author Susan Orlean and John Laroche, the subject of her book, and ends up writing a screenplay about his failed adaptive efforts. Though Adaptation eventually succumbs to the laws of the Hollywood story-telling paradigm – the film ends up using all the elements the protagonist initially dismisses as Hollywood drivel – it violates many

122  Appropriating Twins others, including the ones formulated on-screen in McKee’s apodictic ramblings. Moreover, the film constantly lays bare the story of its own making, the difficulties inherent in its creative decisions, and the problematic nature of adaptation itself. Kaufman not only obliterates the literary source that he initially pledges fidelity to, his efforts also literally kill the man who inspired it. During a climactic chase through the swamps of Florida, Laroche is eaten by an alligator, which suggests that the cultural work of adaptation is a dangerous form of poaching: Kaufman’s creative ‘devouring’ conjures up the presence of the hungry alligator as animus. The devouring resonates with one of the film’s central motifs: at one point, Charlie’s twin brother Donald, a happy-go-lucky man-child who gladly embraces the commercial aspects of writing, introduces the central premise of his own formulaic script as that of a psychopathic killer who makes his victims eat their own cut-off body parts, like “a snake swallowing its own tail”. There is a mythological pre-text for this emblem, and it is Charlie who identifies it: “I’m Ouroboros”, he insists. “I’ve written myself into my screenplay. […] It’s self-indulgent, it’s narcissistic, solipsistic, it’s pathetic. I’m pathetic”. This is Kaufman holding court over his own work, whose mise-en-abyme structure is a tad too self-indulgent for some tastes. Yet Kaufman-the-screenwriter chasing the tail of Kaufman-the-protagonist – an image I will return to in the final chapter of this book – is only one of several ways in which Adaptation tries to have its cake and eat it. On the surface, the appearance of Charlie’s twin Donald, who was co-credited as one of Adaptation’s screenwriters and ended up as one of the few fictional creations ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, may be just one more aspect of Kaufman’s “masturbatory solipsism” (Elliott 2012, 146), but his inclusion in the film resonates with several of its themes. The idea of multiple identities and split personality is echoed in the Charlie/Donald dualism and in Nicolas Cage’s stellar performance of the two – Cage may just be the only American screen actor who has made schizophrenia such an indispensable part of his trademark persona that he seems to be playing himself even when he is playing twins. Adaptation’s postmodern game of hide-and-seek extends to the plot of Donald’s clichéd and implausible script, where the serial killer and the detective are revealed to be one and the same person, as well as to Charlie’s erotic daydreaming. On hearing that Charlie has a twin brother, McKee compares the Kaufmans to the Epstein twins, the screenwriters who specialised in adaptations during the Golden Age of Old Hollywood, co-writing Casablanca (1942) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Unlike the Epsteins, though, the Kaufman twins never see eye to eye in terms of their artistic ambitions; they invert the classic dichotomy between art and commerce: The simple-minded hack Donald writes what passes for an original screenplay in Hollywood diction, as it is not based

Appropriating Twins  123 on a literary source, while Charlie, the intellectual who is always striving for originality, writes an adaptation.10 While Adaptation foregoes the farcical tropes of confusion, never cashing in on the twins’ potential for providing stock situations of mistaken identity, the Charlie/Donald pairing adds to the many facets of the film’s biological and Darwinian subtexts. Where Laroche’s passionate monologue about eros in nature suggests a strong overlap between pollination and the artistic process, Kaufman – the insect drawn to the beauty and allure of Orlean’s book – dreams futile dreams of making love, both to women and to other people’s texts. In one of the film’s most emblematic scenes, he masturbates to the author photograph of Orlean which is printed on his copy of The Orchid Thief. The image of the solipsistic jerk(-off) who lets all his ‘juices’ go to waste and thus embodies “artistic sterility” (Marks 2008, 20) is only one of several ways in which Adaptation juxtaposes literary and biological ideas. Though it builds on rather questionable assumptions regarding the nature/culture divide, the film bears out a somewhat pseudo-­Darwinian understanding of adaptation, problematic as this may be (see Nicklas 2015). Twinship always invokes the nature/nurture debate that is tied up with the Darwinian legacy, and the latter permeates nearly every scene in Adaptation. “Adaptation’s a profound process”, Laroche observes in a key scene of the film, “it means you figure out how to thrive in the world”. It is a lesson initially lost on Charlie, who fails to see that the assignment handed to him by the producers requires him to adapt in another sense: to the screenwriting industry. Instead of writing a straightforward genre film to cash in on the book’s cachet, he monologues madly into his Dictaphone, ponders how “to dramatise a flower,” and gets so infatuated with the idea of going back ‘to the beginning’ that his narration – like that of Adaptation, the film – takes in everything from the Big Bang to the evolution of the planet’s wildlife from primitive organisms. “This was before sex”, Kaufman adds almost apologetically, as if to acknowledge reluctantly that birth and death, themes he abhors when they are solidified into stereotypical movie tropes, are, in fact, part of life. As he remains confined to his ivory tower, Charlie is unable to connect with anyone and frequently wallows in self-pity when his brother attempts to bond with him: “You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that?” Charlie’s idea of loneliness, which once again hints at the paradox of twinship (‘being unique by virtue of being identical’), is not free of contradictions. Not only does he, in spite of his ill-advised ‘mating’ activities, actively seek solitude, fashioning himself as the melancholic loner who is misunderstood by everyone, he even refuses any kind of family connection in several senses of the word. Unlike his brother, Charlie despises genre films, which draw an audience because they are familiar.

124  Appropriating Twins Even though Donald’s enthusiastic endorsement of the screenwriting guru’s truisms reveals him to be a simpleton, the joke ultimately is on Charlie, who fails to grasp that his intellectual snobbery does not automatically pave the way towards originality. He enslaves himself to Orlean’s book and remains unaware that adaptation, too, is as much prone to generic mannerisms as any other filmic genre.11 Donald’s death in the swamps of Louisiana provides the generic conclusion to Adaptation’s ironic engagement with stock Hollywood tropes, but it is fitting with regard to the fraternal struggle that permeates all twinship and, to some degree, all adaptation. By willing his brother to die, Charlie gladly accepts the role of an auxiliary to what he rather vaguely perceives as nature’s Darwinian scheme, a ‘survival of the fittest’ scenario set in the narrow confines of the womb. The existential struggle for nutrition so frequently described by the midwife manuals of the Renaissance leads to considerable imbalances in development and, in the case of the Kaufman twins, eventually produces two different forms of artistic stagnation. Adaptation’s twisted happy ending sees Charlie successfully absorb his twin, albeit several decades after their birth, and thus appropriate all of Donald’s dubious virtues in the process, thereby successfully transforming “[t]he horror of mere duplication embodied in twins” into “the triumph of continual environmental adaptation” (Corrigan 2017, 24). The idea of adaptation as a battle with the spectral twin may, on the surface, resonate with the ‘fraternity’ model of adaptation that was briefly referenced in the discussion of Angoor, but its semantic implication is a quite different one, more in line with an idea put forward by Thomas Leitch. In his reading of Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake of Psycho (1998), Leitch suggests that Van Sant’s film is not so much “an attempt to duplicate Hitchcock’s [film]; instead it poses as its double, its twin, its mirror image” (2010, 73). The notion of twinning is a productive one in the context of adaptation, where cultural properties are duplicated and where questions of resemblance, progeny, primogeniture, and ‘originality’ are negotiated. Leitch suggests that some degree of twinning applies to every adaptation, even those which, unlike Psycho, do not reveal the notion of fidelity to be psychotic and which do not stress “the folly of attempting to become your mother by submerging your agency in her authority” (2010, 74–85). There is something to be said for twins standing emblematically for adaptation itself, though the metaphor is, at first glance, of limited applicability. After all, adaptations usually stem from different parentage than their elder siblings, which is not usually the case when it comes to twins. But then again, it is not always as clear-cut as this. According to a Hippocratic idea that still found extensive support throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, multiple pregnancies were caused exclusively by superfetation: two consecutive carnal acts. Even though it sounds like a rather outrageous footnote from the annals of medical history, the phenomenon

Appropriating Twins  125 has, in fact, been demonstrated to occur in humans (see Segal 2017, 10–12). Though extremely rare, it was for some centuries thought to be the most typical way of conceiving twins (see Culpeper 1651/1668, 95; Sharp 1671, 70–71), with various theorists drawing analogies to the animal kingdom or, indeed, to the world of mythology. The spectre of superfetation was to haunt twin discourse for several centuries, as both medical authorities and story-tellers, who are sometimes quite hard to tell apart, continued to insist that twin pregnancies could only come about if a woman had repeated intercourse and, in some accounts, if she slept with several men, which granted the husband the right to draw the consequences (see Lévi-Strauss 1995, 120–121). Evidently, the idea was to discourage pregnant women from engaging in extramarital affairs, which are less likely to yield visible proof if a woman is already pregnant. Superfetation thus provides a welcome cautionary tale to teach women not to give in to their sexual impulses: in early modern England, the articulation of female desire spells trouble and provokes crisis narratives (see Read 2013, 48–51), and it is easy to link this discourse to adaptation, which is driven by a similar obsession regarding fidelity. The fidelity paradigm, in particular, “constructs a gendered possession of authority and paternity for the source text within adaptation: the film as faithful wife to the novel as paternal husband” (Cobb 2010, 30). If twins signify illegitimacy and adultery, then a similar case could be made for the gestures of illegitimate appropriation that permeate adaptation discourse. One could probe the idea even further and argue for the presence of several other twin effects in the realm of adaptation; for instance, in the all-too-familiar debate surrounding fidelity and a film’s alleged ‘duty’ to resemble the literary property it is based on. As my own readings of the various adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedy have illustrated, a well-known twin paradox guides our reading of adaptations as adaptations: if there is a visible difference between two separate properties with a shared family connection, we are more likely to look for similarities, whereas if two properties seem to match at first sight, we will be drawn towards seeking out the differences between them, maybe because complete identity contradicts our sense of what is normal. There is yet another dimension of twinning to adaptation and its appropriative gestures: the intertextual practice of quotation, which Marjorie Garber investigates with characteristic Derridean aplomb in her insightful study, Quotation Marks (2003). As a way of invoking authority and giving credit where it was due, the quotation mark properly took off in the eighteenth century, when commonplace books and encyclopaedias – many of which were centred around received wisdom and Shakespearean idioms – were en vogue, so that the rise of the quotation mark coincides with and facilitates the rise of modern authorship (de Grazia 1991, 68). As a device that manages both to incorporate a pre-text and to introduce a moment of doubt and distancing towards

126  Appropriating Twins it, the quotation mark is an ambiguous tool of appropriation, and if citation relies on a text’s iterability by virtue of detaching it from its original context, then “every repetition is a repetition with a difference, [and] duplication becomes ‘duplicity’” (Garber 2003, 21). Insofar as the quotation mark serves as a guarantee of exact duplication while simultaneously attenuating the original into “a shadowy revenant, a ghost” (Desmet 2014, 45), it is twinned appropriation writ large. The Charlie/ Donald divide provides an uncanny reminder that adaptation always constitutes a form of ‘vanishing twin’ syndrome, as the process is forever characterised by a struggle between two fraternal parties. The survivor is haunted by spectral appearances similar to those Derrida traces in Specters of Marx (1993), “perpetually returning presences that bring echoes from the past” and “creative moments of conjuring up ghosts” (Pietrzak-Franger 2012, 78, 81). Twins can thus embody quotation and citation (de Nooy 2005, 137), an idea that finds its most iconic illustration in Gilbert Adair’s The Dreamers, where twins Isabelle and Théo withdraw to the home of their absent parents, committing themselves to a sealed-off world of incestuous fornication and constant back-and-forth referencing of the films they have seen. Sitting together in a bathtub together with their friend Matthew, Isabelle and Théo frame the only ‘foreign body’ that is present in the apartment as quotation marks, “encircl[ing] his waist with their matchingly long legs, the water-wrinkled toes of the one stretching as far as the armpits of the other” (Adair 1988/2004, 123). Without allowing a breath of fresh air to disturb their absolutely supplementary arrangement, they content themselves with a fully citational, self-sufficient ­existence throughout the weeks of revolutionary turmoil in 1968’s Paris, going so far as to choreograph their sex like a Busby Berkeley number. Twins can act as a Xerox machine of iterability: an argument further borne out by Baudrillard’s and Derrida’s takes on the duplicity of cloning, which Chapter 6 will investigate. Accordingly, they also bring the possibilities of forgery and appropriation to the table. The twinned duplicity of the appropriated quotation was illustrated rather neatly by a minor controversy that arose in 2015, when film critic Benjamin Lee accused the marketing department responsible for promoting Brian Helgeland’s twin gangster biopic Legend of having wilfully misrepresented his review of the film. Lee had awarded the film a mere two out of five stars in The Guardian, yet the poster designers decided to hide his scathing review in plain sight, putting Lee’s two stars between the ears of the twin protagonists, thus conveying the impression that The Guardian had given the film a glowing four-star recommendation like the other publications surrounding it (Fig. 4.8). Lee himself acknowledged the move as “maddeningly brilliant,” giving the poster designers credit for their “chutzpah” (2015), but one could go further and highlight the brilliance of the structural pun that occurs here.

Appropriating Twins  127

Fig. 4.8  Duplicitous twinning in the adverts for Legend.

The two stars of Lee’s verdict are located between the film’s two stars – who are, in fact, just one star: Tom Hardy times two – and the two heads of the actor(s), which are the result of special effects wizardry and thus a confidence trick to begin with, give the impression of hiding yet another reduplication: that of the two visible stars. In fact, however, they camouflage absence. Evidently, twins do not always have to show their full power when it comes to greedy appropriation – sometimes, it is enough for them to give the impression that they are capable of appropriating and devouring, PacMan-like, whatever they can.

Notes 1 In fact, Frankenstein frequents charnel houses and dissecting rooms to obtain his materials, but collective memory has merged his story with subsequent grave-robber legends like that of Burke and Hare. 2 George Walton Williams (2006) investigates various attempts to cast one actor in the twin roles, a trend that started in the 1960s and that may have been inspired by Carlo Goldoni’s I due gemelli veneziani (Two Venetian Twins, 1748), where it is customary to have one actor play both brothers. 3 In his brief foreword, Reynolds simply states that The Comedy of Errors provides “the best vehicle” to allow for Shakespeare’s lyrical compositions to be “sung in a Theatre”, and he ends by giving a shout-out to “our immortal Bard!” (Reynolds 1819/1971, n.p.s). 4 Twelfth Night similarly refuses the reunited twins an embrace, yet if this is perceived as an oddity, we can count on critics not to blame Shakespeare. Stanley Wells suggests this direction “is one that was never meant to be obeyed” (1986, 275). 5 I am grateful to Geoff Brown, who generously shared his expertise on the difficult credit terminology of 1930s Hollywood screenwriting with me. According to Brown, Jevne and Rogers must have assembled the screen story

128  Appropriating Twins which was then fleshed out by Adler, Connell, and Stan Laurel, who often worked on the scripts without receiving a credit. 6 The film’s distinct visual style is credited to cinematographer Rudolph Maté, whose “classic dramatic lighting” is quite untypical for a Laurel/Hardy comedy (Louvish 2001, 344). 7 The most successful and enduring adaptations of the novel include Das doppelte Lottchen (1950), Twice upon a Time (1953), The Parent Trap (1961), the latter’s remake of the same name (1998), and It Takes Two (1995). 8 However, the Marx Brothers were not the first to use the gag (see Balducci 2012, 163–167). There are echoes of the joke in Nabokov’s Despair (1965), when the narrator runs into his alleged doppelganger for the first time and tries to establish difference by moving his arms, as though he were staring into a mirror. 9 On the musical’s appropriation of its Plautine and Shakespearean sources, see Moore (2013). 10 Sergio Rizzo notes that the year when Adaptation was up for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, the traditional dichotomies of the Academy Awards were somewhat unsettled. An Original Screenplay nominee like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) had all the features of an adaptation, whereas Kaufman’s script was “more like an original screenplay” (2008, 301). The paradoxes inherent in the Oscar-related dualism between ‘original’ and ‘adapted’ screenplays are examined in Schwanebeck (2014). 11 It is worth considering an argument put forward by Thomas Leitch (2008) here: that adaptation functions as a genre insofar as it works with textual markers that are aimed at a ‘high-brow’ audience in particular.

Works Cited Primary Texts Adair, Gilbert (1988/2004). The Dreamers. London: Faber & Faber. Allen-Dutton, Jordan, et al. (1999/2010). The Bomb-itty of Errors. New York: Samuel French. Borges, Jorge Luis (1939/1998). “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin, 33–43. Hull, Thomas (1793/1971). The Comedy of Errors. London: Cornmarket. Jacobs, W.W. (1903). “The Money-Box.” The Literature Network, www.­onlineliterature.com/ww-jacobs/1742/. Nabokov, Vladimir (1965). Despair. New York: G.P. Putnam. Phillips, Marie (2019). Oh, I Do Like to Be …. London: Unbound. Plato (2008). The Symposium. Trans. Margaret C. Howatson. Cambridge: CUP. Plautus (1996). “The Brothers Menaechmus.” Four Comedies. Trans. and ed. Erich Segal. Oxford/New York: OUP, 75–130. Reynolds, Frederick (1819/1971). The Comedy of Errors. London: Cornmarket. Rodgers, Richard, Lorenz Hart, and George Abbott (1965). The Boys from Syracuse [Vocal Score]. New York: Chappell. Shakespeare, William (1594/2008). The Comedy of Errors. Ed. Charles Whitworth. Oxford: OUP. Woods, William (1780). The Twins; or, Which Is Which? Edinburgh: Cadell & Elliot. Zolidis, Don (2018). The Comedy of Terrible Errors (Large Cast). Los Angeles: YouthPlays.

Appropriating Twins  129 Other Media Adaptation (2002). Dir. Spike Jonze. Sony. Angoor (1982). Dir. Gulzar. A.R. Movies. Big Business (1929). Dir. James W. Horne. MGM. Big Business (1988). Dir. Jim Abrahams. Buena Vista. Duck Soup (1933). Dir. Leo McCarey. Paramount. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Dir. Philip Kaufman. United Artists. Legend (2015). Dir. Brian Helgeland. Working Title. Our Relations (1936). Dir. Harry Lachman. MGM. The Boys from Syracuse (1938). By Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Abbott. The Comedy of Errors (1983). Dir. James Cellan Jones. BBC. Twice Two (1933). Dir. James Parrott. MGM. Wall Street (1987). Dir. Oliver Stone. Fox. “Zanzibar” (2018). S4E1 of Inside No. 9. Cr. Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. BBC.

Secondary Texts Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer (1944/2013). “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Global Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Richard J. Lane. London: Routledge, 329–336. Allen, Richard (2014). “Comedies of Errors: Shakespeare, Indian Cinema, and the Poetics of Mistaken Identity.” Bollywood Shakespeares. Eds. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 165–192. Balducci, Anthony (2012). The Funny Parts: A History of Film Comedy Routines and Gags. Jefferson: McFarland. Barr, Charles (1968). Laurel & Hardy. Berkeley: U of California P. Bermel, Albert (1982). Farce: A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bloom, Harold (1975). The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: OUP. Boas, Frederick S. (1896/1910). Shakspere [sic!] and His Predecessors. London: John Murray. Chakravarti, Paromita (2015). “Pleasurable Errors and Erroneous Pleasures: Renegotiating Shakespearean Romance in Three Indian Films.” Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys. Eds. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick, and Poonam Trivedi. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 219–238. Clark, Sandra (1997). “Introduction.” Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. Ed. Sandra Clark. London: Everyman, xliii– lxxviii. Cobb, Shelley (2010). “Adaptation, Fidelity, and Gendered Discourses.” Adaptation 4.1: 28–37. Corrigan, Timothy (2017). “Defining Adaptation.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Ed. Thomas Leitch. Oxford: OUP, 23–35. Culpeper, Nicholas (1651/1668). A Directory for Mid-Wives: Or, A Guide for Women, in Their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling Their Children. Edinburgh.

130  Appropriating Twins de Grazia, Margreta (1991). “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks.” The Appropriation of Shakespeare. Ed. Jean I. Marsden. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 57–71. de Nooy, Juliana (2005). Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Desmet, Christy (2014). “Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation.” Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 41–57. Doniger, Wendy (2000). The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P. Elliott, Kamilla (2012). “The Adaptation of Adaptation: A Dialogue between the Arts and Sciences.” Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation. Eds. Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 145–161. Esslin, Martin (1981). “Joe Orton: The Comedy of (Ill) Manners.” Contemporary English Drama. Ed. C.W.E. Bigsby. London: Arnold, 95–107. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier (2000). “General Introduction.” Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Eds. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. London: Routledge, 1–22. Flaig, Paul (2011). “Lacan’s Harpo.” Cinema Journal 50.4: 98–116. Flood, Alison (2018). “Plagiarism Software Pins down New Source for Shakespeare’s Plays.” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/09/ shakespeare-plagiarism-software-george-north. Ford, John R. (2006). “‘Methinks You Are My Glass’: Looking for The Comedy of Errors in Performance.” Shakespeare Bulletin 24.1: 11–28. Garber, Marjorie (2003). Quotation Marks. London/New York: Routledge. Giskin, Howard (2005). “Borges’ Revisioning of Reading in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Variaciones Borges 19: 103–123. Grossman, Julie (2015). Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Henderson, Diana (2006). Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Hogan, Charles Beecher (1952). Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1701–1800. Vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon. Huang, Alexa, and Elizabeth Rivlin (2014). “Introduction: Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation.” Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–20. Inchbald, Elizabeth (1808). “Remarks.” The Comedy of Errors, as Performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. By William Shakespeare. London: Longman, 3–6. Krämer, Lucia (2015). “The End of the Hollywood ‘Rip-Off’? Changes in the Bollywood Politics of Copyright.” The Politics of Adaptation. Eds. Dan Hassler-­Forest and Pascal Nicklas. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 143–157. Lee, Benjamin (2015). “How My Negative Review of Legend Was Spun into Movie Marketing Gold.” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/ 2015/sep/09/legend-review-movie-marketing-false-advertising.

Appropriating Twins  131 Leitch, Thomas (2007). Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From ‘Gone with the Wind’ to ‘The Passion of the Christ’. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Leitch, Thomas (2008). “Adaptation, the Genre.” Adaptation 1.2: 106–120. Leitch, Thomas (2010). “The Ethics of Infidelity.” Adaptation Studies: New Approaches. Eds. Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins. Madison/ Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 61–77. Leitch, Thomas (2018). “The Dark Side of Adaptation.” Patricia Highsmith on Screen. Eds. Douglas McFarland and Wieland Schwanebeck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 21–40. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1995). The Story of Lynx. Trans. Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Louvish, Simon (2001). Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy. London: Faber & Faber. Marks, Peter (2008). “Adaptation from Charles Darwin to Charlie Kaufman.” Sydney Studies in English 34: 19–40. Marsden, Jean I. (1991). “Introduction.” The Appropriation of Shakespeare. Ed. Jean I. Marsden. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1–10. Mercer, John M. (1993). “Making the Twins Realistic in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 19: 97–113. Miola, Robert S. (1997). “The Play and the Critics.” The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: Routledge, 3–51. Moore, Timothy J. (2013). “Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse: Shakespeare Made Plautine.” Ancient Comedy and Reception. Ed. S. Douglas Olson. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 762–785. Nicklas, Pascal (2015). “Biopolitics of Adaptation.” The Politics of Adaptation. Eds. Dan Hassler-Forest and Pascal Nicklas. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 229–242. Odell, George C. (1920). Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. Vol. II. New York: Scribner. Orlean, Susan (2002). “Foreword.” Adaptation: The Shooting Script. By Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman. New York: Newmarket, vii–ix. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika (2012). “Conversing with Ghosts: Or, the Ethics of Adaptation.” Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation. Eds. Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 70–88. Read, Sara (2013). Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern ­England. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rizzo, Sergio (2008). “(In)fidelity Criticism and the Sexual Politics of Adaptation.” Literature/Film Quarterly 36.4: 299–314. Sanders, Julie (2016). Adaptation and Appropriation. London/New York: Routledge. Saunders, David (1992). Authorship and Copyright. London/New York: Routledge. Schwanebeck, Wieland (2014). “Oscar’s Unrecognized Adaptations: Woody Allen and the Myth of the Original Screenplay.” Literature/Film Quarterly 42.1: 359–372. Schwanebeck, Wieland (2019). “The Twin Who Came from Abroad: The Comedy of Errors and Transcultural Adaptation.” Shakespeare, doi.org/10.1080/ 17450918.2019.1636854.

132  Appropriating Twins Segal, Nancy L. (2017). Twin Mythconceptions: False Beliefs, Fables, and Facts about Twins. London: Academic. Shahani, Gitanjali, and Brinda Charry (2014). “The Bard in Bollywood: The Fraternal Nation and Shakespearean Adaptation in Hindi Cinema.” Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 161–177. Sharp, Jane (1671). The Midwives Book. Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered. Directing Childbearing Women How to Behave Themselves in Their Conception, Breeding, Bearing, and Nursing of Children. London. Sillars, Stuart (2006). “Image, Genre, Interpretation: The Visual Identities of The Comedy of Errors.” Interfaces 25: 11–34. Taylor, Gary (1990). Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. London: Hogarth. Taylor, Gary (1999). “The Incredible Shrinking Bard.” Shakespeare and Appropriation. Eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. London/New York: Routledge, 197–205. Wells, Stanley (1971). “Introduction.” The Comedy of Errors. By Thomas Hull. London: Cornmarket, n.p. Wells, Stanley (1986). “Reunion Scenes in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night.” A Yearbook of Studies in English Language and Literature 1985/86. Ed. Otto Rauchbauer. Vienna: Braumüller, 267–276. Williams, George Walton (2006). “Correcting Double Vision in The Comedy of Errors.” Renaissance Papers: 91–96. Williamson, Judith (1991). “‘Up Where You Belong’: Hollywood Images of Big Business in the 1980s.” Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. Eds. John Corner and Sylvia Harvey. London/New York: Routledge, 147–156. Žižek, Slavoj (2000). “Of Cells and Slaves.” The Žižek Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 302–320.

5 Detecting Twins

In The Abominable Bride (2016), an episode of the renowned TV series Sherlock (BBC) set during the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves at their wits’ end. Several eye-witnesses testify to having seen young Emelia Ricoletti shoot her husband outside a London opium den; however, Emelia herself has committed suicide several hours before the reported assassination. How, then, could ‘the abominable bride’ have been outside the opium den and in the London morgue at the same time? WATSON:  Could it have been twins? HOLMES:  No. WATSON:  Why not? HOLMES:  Because it’s never twins. […] WATSON:  Maybe it was a secret twin.

[…] A twin that nobody knows about. This whole thing could have been planned. HOLMES:  Since the moment of conception. How breathtakingly prescient of her! It is never twins, Watson. This brief exchange vividly illustrates the horrid reputation of the twin motif as one of the most clichéd tropes in all of detective literature. While Holmes occasionally crosses paths with twins in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, he never identifies them as the culprits, which suggests that the hackneyed trope is far beneath him. This has not stopped other successors of Conan Doyle from flirting with twinship. In his pastiche novel Moriarty (2015), Anthony Horowitz turns Holmes’s nemesis into a twin, and he has a point – after all, Sidney Paget’s illustration of Holmes and Moriarty fighting at the edge of the Reichenbach Falls is not too far removed from the ambiguous embraces that abound throughout the history of twinship, the two antagonists forever entwined. Holmes is not the only one who feels intellectually insulted by twinned solutions. During the ‘Golden Age of Detective Fiction,’ several authors of country-house mysteries and theorists of the genre tried to formulate a codex for the genre. Amongst these rules, whose tongue-in-cheek presentation never completely obliterates the underlying snobbery, resides

134  Detecting Twins the inevitable clause that addresses what stereotypes the aspiring mystery writer is to avoid at all costs. S.S. Van Dine, author of the Philo Vance novels, includes the “final pinning of the crime on a twin” in his list of devices that any “self-respecting detective-story writer” should avoid (Van Dine 1928/1946, 192), while Ronald A. Knox proclaims that “[t]win brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (Knox 1928/1946, 196). By the same token, Roger Caillois frowns upon cheap solutions such as when “the author bases his plot on the existence of twins or doubles” (1941/1983, 9). Their critique is aimed at detective stories like Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Image in the Mirror (1933), where Lord Peter Wimsey deduces that a war veteran’s ‘mirror image’ twin is committing crimes in his name. In the realm of the mystery short-story, where the punch-line structure takes priority over psychological nuance, Sayers just about gets away with the unlikely solution, having her detective pin it on “one of those cheery little ironies of which life is so full” (Sayers 1933/1969, 33). Twin tales of this variety are a dime a dozen, and it is not hard to see why the locked-room mystery and the twin narrative should make for such natural bedfellows: after all, is not the ‘locked room’ the very ideal that many twin narratives strive for, in that it enables the protagonists’ struggle to recapture the blissful state of being inside the womb? Agatha Christie includes twins as ‘red herrings’ in The Murder on the Links (1923), her second Hercule Poirot novel, which sees the acrobatic Duveen sisters caught up in the investigation. Ironically, though, it is not the twins whose similarity proves key to the investigation, but a murderous mother-daughter pairing whose “profiles are singularly alike” (Christie 1923/1994, 204). Not that the twin cliché was completely beneath a prolific author like Christie: the conclusion of The Unbreakable Alibi (1929) hinges on the last-minute addition of the ‘twin sister from Australia’. When the detective claims that the solution to the mystery is “[n]ot at all like anything I have ever read in detective stories” (Christie 1929/2015, 218), it is hard to imagine that Christie actually kept a straight face while writing this down. Elsewhere in the genre, variations abound. The protagonist in Roy Vickers’ Double Image (1953) convinces everyone that his identical sibling, believed to have died at birth, is in fact alive and out to ruin him, so that he can murder his rich uncle and blame it on the ‘evil twin,’1 while Ellery Queen tries to unravel The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933), where it is conjoined twin suspects who give the detectives a severe headache: “The law says a person condemned to death shall be executed. Shall we execute? Clearly impossible without also executing an innocent individual” (n.p.). Double Shock (1973), an episode of the long-running police procedural Columbo (1968–2003), is one of the few whodunit cases in a series that usually makes no secret of the killer’s identity. Columbo eventually deduces that the twin brothers have plotted with rather than against each other, in order to provide each other’s alibis.

Detecting Twins  135 Instead of setting his two suspects the elaborate, customary trap, the detective simply establishes that they are still tied together by the same ‘umbilical cord,’ their telephone line, in order to get a confession out of them: “[The telephone company] told me that you two have talked maybe twenty times in the last ten days”, an accusation that prompts the culprits not only to confess but to resort to tautological double-speak: “What’s done is done. What’s obvious is obvious”. The suspected presence of twins remains a running gag in the long tradition of detective fiction. In Sleuth (1970), his double-layered deconstruction of the whodunit’s most prevalent clichés, Anthony Shaffer (whose own connection to the twin motif as one half of the Shaffer siblings has already been addressed in Chapter 2) has his protagonist, crime novelist Andrew Wyke contemplate the most persisting stereotypes, and it is no coincidence that his list includes the “twin brothers” from Australia (31), for the association with the (penal) colonies is very much in line with the historical treatment of the twin motif, as we shall see. Shaffer may have been thinking of A.A. Milne’s Red House Mystery (1922); this highly successful (though twin-free) murder mystery by the creator of Winnie the Pooh contains a chapter called “The Brother from Australia” and features an investigation that is complicated by the fact that the victim has been posing as his own sibling. Tom Stoppard, whose works frequently deconstruct or invert cherished theatrical traditions, is similarly tongue-in-cheek in his treatment of twins. His play Hapgood (1988) revels excessively in variations on this theme, featuring real and made-up twins, double agents, and duplicitous lovers, all of which contributes to the text’s thorough exploration of the topic of (un)certainty and Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle. By Stoppard’s own admission, the play’s outrageously complicated plot is deliberately silly (see Powell 2014, 335), but his characters are in on the joke, musing that “those damned twins” that the Russian secret service has been using as a decoy “are like an old joke which keeps coming back” (Stoppard 1988, 13). Paradoxically, the use of the twins as red herrings (or ‘incidental twin’ syndrome) in the smoke-and-mirrors context of espionage and duplicity places all the more emphasis on them, even though Hapgood’s Russian twins amount to little more than personified MacGuffins. Not that all creators of mystery narratives are equally self-aware when they resort to twins, making up in twisted psychology for what their stories lack in sophisticated plotting. When the performing arts tackle the material, they use inventive visual trickery in order to keep the viewer hooked. In The Dark Mirror (1946), Olivia de Havilland’s character gradually becomes aware that her murderous twin sister is about to absorb her identity, which makes this both a Gothic tale of dark family secrets and a murder mystery, though one with very few suspects. Klaus Kinski’s ex-convict undergoes a similar ordeal in Die blaue Hand (Creature with the Blue Hand, 1967), an Edgar Wallace pastiche that answers the

136  Detecting Twins

Fig. 5.1  T he reduplicated Kinski (Creature with the Blue Hand).

question, ‘What is the only thing more terrifying than Klaus Kinski?’, by presenting us with Kinski’s mad twin. The film’s dénouement features the only shot of the two Kinskis together, with the ghostly superimposition – the villain, tied to a chair, seems to float in the picture – adding to the uncanny effect (Fig. 5.1). From the actor’s trademark schizophrenic grin, it is but a small step to the multitude of thrillers and horror films that exploit the twin motif, many of which have their origins in nineteenth-­ century literature, where the twin gained a new significance at about the same time that saw the double rise to literary prominence. This chapter will focus on the emerging genre of detective fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century and will take the doppelganger motif as its point of departure, arguing for a clear cut between both tropes. By focusing on Francis Galton’s contribution to modern twin scholarship and on the early detective novel, I will not only outline how the Victorians ‘invented’ the twin, but also how the contemporary imagination firmly linked it with the figure of the criminal and with the colonial Other. Thus, I will show how the twin motif is caught up in the inception of the detective genre in the 1860s and 1870s, both as a literary motif and as a heuristic tool that allows, or rather necessitates, the figure of the detective to come into being.

The Age of the Double The nineteenth century has often been characterised as the great age of the double, with authors as diverse as Fyodor Dostoevsky, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson exploring the idea

Detecting Twins  137 of uncanny doppelgangers. However, most of the extensive criticism dedicated to nineteenth-century literature marginalises the figure of the twin in the process, a form of critical denigration that goes at the expense of analytical complexity and yields rather over-simplified results. The twin is reduced to a footnote in this discussion, a major oversight with two equally dubious and contradictory implications. One is that doubles and twins are more or less the same thing, the other is that twins are nowhere near as interesting as the psychologically complex alter egos that prefigure the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis. Literary treatments of the double motif in the era of ‘dark romanticism’ often zero in on the idea that well-adjusted individuals who are as certain of their identity as they are of their position in life suddenly find their existence shattered by a double whose appearance challenges and negates the very foundations of their world: their status, their value system, and their humanist ideology. Crucially, though, the double ultimately remains “an imaginary figure” (Baudrillard 1981, 95), and the discovery of the demonic alter ego about to absorb one’s identity is the outward manifestation of an inner turmoil that early psychoanalysis will tap into. The latter is as much interested in autobiographical narratives and dreams as in nineteenth-century novellas in the vein of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1816), where desire, childhood trauma, and castration anxiety are firmly in place. As Cartesian certainties vanish, and the formerly stable mind acknowledges its fragility, a subliminal disillusionment with the failed promises of the enlightenment provokes a literary exploration of the irrational self, as “the ego dissolves into the shifting miasma of the dream state” (Lash 1993, 74). This development coincides with the formation of modern psychology and psychoanalysis. It is usually implied that psychological fragmentation and dissolution are far too complex to be covered by the twin motif, which is viewed as the ‘domesticated’ version of rather troubling ideas (Forderer 1999, 21). Twins tend to be associated more with the physical aspects of doppelganger phenomena, and this simplified view then gives rise to the idea that twins only exist in the realm of comedy, where the issue of mistaken identity can be trusted to be neatly dissolved and naturalised with the assembly of the happy family in the final act. Readings of this kind are supplemented by other dubious generalisations: for instance, that the genre of psychological horror is the exclusive domain of the double, so that it almost looks as though the double and the twin were mutually exclusive rather than complementary and overlapping. Paul Coates insinuates as much when he claims that “twins are staple figures of comic literature” while the Double, as “the emissary of death,” recaptures “the image of the twin for non-comic literature” (1988, 2–3).2 There are many examples to counter this claim, not least Jordan Peele’s satirical horror film, Us (2019), which accommodates both the double and the twin to rather terrifying effect, causing one character to complain: “It’s too many twins, man.”

138  Detecting Twins I have already voiced my conviction that twins are never exclusively semantisised in a comic fashion, even when they appear in comedies. A claim to this end would be as short-sighted as arguing that the double has only seen diabolical manifestations throughout its literary history. Even the doppelgangers of the nineteenth century are more diverse than is frequently admitted, depending on what situations they are involved in and how they are gendered (see Dettmering 2006, 126–127). If it were true that twins only do the double’s ‘dirty work’ in the more frequently maligned literary genre of comedy, it would be hard to account for Victorian literature’s troubled family narratives and for the repeat occurrence of twins during the formative years of detective fiction and psychological horror. Here, it becomes obvious that the twin motif can be semantisised in ways that the generic double is not capable of. Twins indicate troubling subtexts in family relationships, corporeal horrors linked to the idea of the abject, and – in a wider, more political sense – uncanny twin relationships in the ‘family tree’ of colonialism.

Victorian Twin Tales This chapter mainly investigates novelistic contributions to the twin motif, yet this does not mean that twins were unknown to the Victorian stage. Fast-paced comedies of mistaken identity were easily accommodated here, Charley’s Aunt (1892) being the most popular one, while Joseph Derrick’s Twins (1884) saw successful runs on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1880s. Spectacle was key to attracting audiences, with the standard repertory of music hall theatres frequently including anthropological ‘freak show’ acts like Siamese twins (Bratton 2004, 178), and theatrical innovations mainly occurring in the realm of stage trickery rather than in dramaturgy. Theatre did its best to stay ahead of the competition when attractions like the popular laterna magica shows hailed in the age of the cinematograph at the end of the nineteenth century. Cinema would later marry the Victorian novel’s preoccupation with the uncanny and its neo-Gothic obsessions to the era’s theatrical illusionism so as to lend it a degree of (corpo-)reality. We are still affected by this legacy today, with reduplicated actors often serving as trial runs for innovative visual effects.3 Film was quick to assemble an impressive arsenal of conjuring tricks in order to duplicate actors, including mirror effects, body doubles, projections, and the Schüfftan process. Even the technical imperfections of the time can add to the effectiveness: in The Dark Mirror, the image of Olivia de Havilland talking to her ‘twin’ without really looking into her eyes provides an eerily uncanny effect similar to the one of the floating Kinski twin in Creature with the Blue Hand; the shot signals to the viewer that something is not quite right (Fig. 5.2). Though the two twin bodies are thus brought together in one image, an invisible demarcation line continues to run through the mise-en-scène, resonating

Detecting Twins  139

Fig. 5.2  Olivia de Havilland and her uncanny twin (The Dark Mirror).

with visual trickery similar to the mirror in the Marx Brothers routine or the split-screen exemplified by Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973). The advent of digital technology leads to a wider array of possibilities, but the seams are never completely invisible, especially since many of these films remain keen on marketing their visual trickery as visual trickery, thus drawing attention to the fault-lines rather than hiding them. Such melodramatic illusionism was prefigured by the stage tricks of the Victorians, even though the more ambitious playwrights of the era refrained from the technique. I have discussed George Bernard Shaw’s conflicted relationship with twin farce in Chapter 3; Henrik Ibsen directed a production of Envold Falsen’s Dragedukken (1797) in Bergen in 1852, but this play only featured twins in order to draw attention to the dire economic consequences that multiple progeny had for poor families (Ewbank 1996, 274–275). Some of this spirit permeates T.W. Robertson’s Ours (1866), a patriotic comedy about the Crimean War. It features a running gag involving the character of Sergeant Jones, who already has six children at home when his wife gives birth to twins; throughout the play, he is repeatedly reminded of this “joyful double-barrelled event” (Robertson 1866/1980, 59), and no-one seems to be quite sure whether to congratulate the Jones family or to commiserate with them. A wealthy magnate contemplates giving Jones the whopping sum of 50 pounds “in consideration of his recent domestic – affliction” (72), while others suspect that his economic worries must be at least as painful as his wife’s

140  Detecting Twins labour pains: “I hope you’ll soon get over it. […] I mean I hope your missus ’ull soon get over it” (59). Such satirical jabs aside, the Victorian stage did not add a lot to the gallery of twin rogues and filial struggles that dominate (post-)Shakespearean drama. It is the Victorian novel that puts a new spin on the motif in order to facilitate the emergence of a new genre and to negotiate topical issues of the day, including crime and colonialism, though this does not mean that Victorian prose always rises above ‘incidental twin’ syndrome. Dickens, for one, regularly uses twins to spice up the dramatis personae of his novels, making sure that they stand out next to the Fagins, Bounderbys, and Miss Havishams. Bleak House (1853) features the Smallweed twins among its large personnel, and in Little Dorrit (1857), Pet Meagles’s sheltered upbringing is explained through the loss of a twin sister during infancy. Another incidental episode occurs in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), when the protagonist encounters the Cheeryble brothers and is astonished by their similarity in physique and dress: “the same face, the same figure, the same coat, waistcoat, and neckcloth, the same breeches and gaiters – nay, there was the very same white hat hanging against the wall!” (Dickens 1839/1991, 453) These are no novels of detection, of course, at least no more than other novels that portray crime and its consequences for a tightly knit group of characters. However, the presence of characters like the ‘glorious old twins’ in Nicholas Nickleby and other serialised novels of the era produces a similar effect to that of the ‘red herring’ in the murder mystery: a conjuring trick, a sleight of hand that instantly grasps the readers’ attention and keeps them hooked, allowing for the characters to make a distinct impression. At the same time, the presence of a twin, even if it does not occur together with a crime, will tap into the readers’ unconscious fears and prejudices, encouraging them to draw premature conclusions or to have an instinctive reaction to this presence. Thus, a novel can easily exploit the uncanny associations that surround twins, the very fact of their twinship rendering them somewhat suspicious. In addition to the Meagles twins, Little Dorrit features another pair of twin siblings: Jeremiah and Ephraim Flintwinch, whose surname embeds the word ‘twin’ within the word ‘flinch,’ as though it were trying to anticipate the reader’s likely reaction to these sinister characters. A similar mechanism is at work whenever Sherlock Holmes encounters twins in the course of his investigations. Neither The Sign of Four (1890) nor The Speckled Band (1892) employs twins as the obvious and frequently maligned mystery device to bring about a surprise ending, but neither is the motif of twinship completely incidental to the themes of these tales, which are informed by the topic of colonialism and depict the dangerous consequences of introducing the exotic Other into an ‘untainted’ English landscape. The two deadly colonial ‘souvenirs’ (the sinister savage Tonga in The Sign of Four and the swamp adder in

Detecting Twins  141 The Speckled Band) intersect with the colonial family histories of the twin siblings, the Sholto brothers and the Stoner sisters, respectively. The very same mechanism of pollution, which is one symptom of what Patrick Brantlinger identifies as the phenomenon of atavistic throwbacks in the Victorian Gothic (1990, 227–253), is linked to frequently employed strategies of Othering in imperial discourse. The process of colonisation leads to the coloniser being haunted by the Other on the home front, so that the Other is no longer just an “exotic grace-note” but “a paradigm-­ shift legible in the deep structure of the novel” (Faulkner 1994, 186). The twin texts discussed in this chapter are highly indicative of that. The default assumption inherent in the idea of having an ‘evil twin’ is that the subject is not evil, and my subsequent analyses will reveal this assumption to be increasingly fragile. In order to explore the instrumental role that the twin played in the nineteenth-century’s epistemic struggles, I will turn to the work of Francis Galton, who features prominently not only in the history of twin scholarship, but also in the Victorian era’s pioneering work in the field of criminology.

Francis Galton and the Birth of Twin Studies In 1875, Francis Galton (a distant cousin of Charles Darwin) published a paper called The History of Twins, as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture. It came a few years after his ground-breaking study of Hereditary Genius (1869), which had made his name in the scientific community, but it was the later publication in Fraser’s Magazine which came to be credited as the moment of inception not only for twin scholarship, but also for the field of eugenics. Galton, a polymath of unrivalled productivity who had previously dabbled in phrenology and anthropology, was clearly influenced by the kind of ‘biological racism’ that had become popularised through the efforts of his famous relative (Waller 2012, 914). Darwin’s publications had caused a stir amongst the scientific community and effectively introduced a fundamental change in Victorian thought (see Dawson 2010, 172–174), one that was acutely felt by Galton himself. As a self-proclaimed explorer, inventor, anthropologist, eugenicist, and failed novelist, Galton was the last of his kind, the Victorian age of science being a time when legislative measures like the 1858 Medical Act professionalised fields that used to be in the hands of aristocrats exclusively, so that the Renaissance man gradually became a thing of the past. However, Galton’s fundamental importance in establishing twin scholarship at a time when medicine became part of the cultural self-­ description (Zwierlein 2005, 182) can only be fully understood against the background of his diverse interests and the disciplines he engaged with, all of which were to feed into the period’s understanding of the twin and thus contributed to the reformulation of the concept. The

142  Detecting Twins Victorians arguably ‘invented’ twins, approaching them on the basis of empiricism and rational thought, and no longer from the perspective of superstitious beliefs regarding witchcraft or the wickedness of the female Other. Of course, these demonic subtexts remained part and parcel of twin discourse throughout the era, and the mystery of their conception continued to invite pseudo-scientific speculation. The importance of Galton’s twin research for the future of eugenics as well as social sciences can hardly be over-estimated. From today’s point of view, his legacy is inevitably tainted by the history of eugenics, it being all too easy to trace subsequent developments from Galton towards subsequent generations of scientists who subscribed to his belief that twin research “affords means of distinguishing between the effects of tendencies received at birth, and of those that were imposed by the circumstances of their afterlives; in other words, between the effects of nature and of nurture” (Galton 1875, 566). Around the turn of the century, Thorndike and others remained convinced that training and education could only do so much, as “the limits set by original nature to each individual” had to be accepted (Thorndike 1905, 552).4 This stance was no doubt facilitated by Galton’s refusal to further investigate his findings and to consider more material. From Thorndike, it was but a small step to the fanaticism of the German school, who not only abandoned all ethics in their research, but who had quotes from Galton on their lips as they did so. Germany’s most prominent eugenicist Otmar von Verschuer, whom I will return to in Chapter 6, credited Galton as “the founder of our science” when he addressed the Royal Society shortly before the start of World War II (1939, 62). No wonder, then, that Galton is frequently “pronounced guilty by retrospective association with the Nazi perversions” (Martin 2012, 918), and his name remains inextricably tied up with a movement that paved the way towards forced sterilisation (Palmer 2011). While others before him had already recognised the importance of compiling twin data, Galton is the first to gather a significant sample to back up his hypothesis that inherited qualities outweighed the effects of nurture by far; a view Galton had run into trouble proving in his previous investigation of ‘Great Englishmen.’ He does not proclaim his conviction with the same kind of dogmatic fervour that later generations of eugenicists would bring to the table, but he is confident enough to conclude that “nature is far stronger than nurture within the limited range that I have been careful to assign to the latter” (Galton 1875, 574). But his conclusion that nurture can do nothing “beyond giving instruction and professional training” (576) is fundamentally put into doubt by several factors, including the highly selective nature of his findings and his limited insight into the genetic processes that result in the conception of identical and fraternal twins. Furthermore, he knows what he wants his data to illustrate even before he assembles and evaluates it – a methodological shortcoming which, as

Detecting Twins  143 critics of the hereditary school have argued, he directly passes on to his descendants in the field. Wherever Galton fails to account for differences between twins, he produces evasive arguments that amount to “classic ‘ad hoc manoeuvre[s]’” in order to “neutralize a piece of awkward data” (Waller 2012, 916). Galton concludes that “we may safely ignore the many small differences in nurture” (1875, 576), but the differences have not actually entered his discussion to begin with, which means that for the most part he remains without insight into hereditary influences or psychology, and his conclusions do not hold up (see Palmer 2011). Still, Galton deserves some credit for introducing statistical methodology into the scientific field, and his emphasis on systematic observation made him not just a methodological pioneer but also a popular author whose ideas circulated widely. By the end of the Victorian period, even a hopeless brat like Sarah Grand’s ‘heavenly twin’ Diavolo has picked up some halfdigested Galton when he lectures his tutor about his “hee-red-it-air-ee ­predisposition to be a muff” (Grand 1893/1992, 127). The s­ cience-friendly climate of high Victorianism would also give birth to Sherlock Holmes, who, in one of his earliest adventures, impatiently cries for “Data! data! data!”, as he “can’t make bricks without clay” (Doyle 1892/1982, 286). The nexus between Victorian twin research and the blossoming field of criminology, to which Galton contributed a lot, is crucial to the rise of the modern detective novel.

The Twin and the Criminal The major conundrum that many literary treatments of the twin motif boil down to is one which Victorian scientists were quite familiar with: how can you tell one from the other? In trying to establish with absolute certainty which of two candidates is the ‘right’ one, the characters who investigate, explore, detect, and err fulfil a quintessentially scientific operation: that of defining, that is, of drawing exact semantic boundaries. In Great Britain, the nineteenth-century science boom facilitated not only the propagandistic belief in the nation’s superiority over the rest of the world but also a generous trust in the ability of science to unambiguously explore and define, and to establish certainty beyond the shadow of a doubt. In Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There (1872), Lewis Carroll lends mathematical and linguistic expertise to the problem of identification and clear-cut boundaries by presenting Alice with a number of paradoxical phenomena, including twin brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Alice may not be outwitted by them, but she is thoroughly confused by the twins, whose astonishing similarity carries over into the narrative’s aesthetic design: the chapter headline, “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” rhymes with the last line of the previous chapter. The protagonist’s encounter with this bizarre double-act resonates throughout the book, most notably in her

144  Detecting Twins encounter with Humpty Dumpty, which is structured around the gulf between signifier and signified. Humpty not only insists that he has no trouble bridging the gap between the two – “When I use a word […] it means just what I choose it to mean” (Carroll 1872/1875, 124) – he also puts the traditional distinction between uniqueness and similarity on its head. When saying goodbye to Alice, he complains that he will not be able to recognise her the next time, for her face is without unique characteristics: “Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance – or the mouth at the top – that would be some help” (ibid. 135). This complaint would have resonated not only with Victorian scientists but also with the newly formed Victorian police force, which adopted anthropometry and other scientific innovations in order to pursue criminals, a project that depended to a large extent on a small ­revolution in statistics and Jacques Bertillon’s system of classification – Galton was intimately familiar with the latter (see G ­ alton 1892, 154–158). One method widely adopted by the police was the thorough categorisation and quantification of criminals, though not all the new techniques proved equally helpful. In one of his many ancillary a­ ctivities, Galton sought to fuse his interest in criminology with his influential work on hereditary features in order to prove “that the criminal nature tends to be inherited” (Galton 1883/1907, 43). By assuming that “there should be some ideal typical form from which the individuals may deviate in all directions, but about which they chiefly cluster, and towards which their descendants will continue to cluster” (ibid. 10), he attempted to synthesise facial features by superimposing different photographic samples, with the explicit aim of producing a ‘typical’ criminal face. The method he employs strikes a chord with the notorious work of criminal anthropologists like Cesare Lombroso, who had published L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man, 1876) at the same time as when Galton began to investigate twins on a larger scale. Both men’s assumptions prove quite influential for the late nineteenth-century discourse on criminology; in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Sherlock Holmes studies family resemblances in the Baskerville family portraits to establish that the culprit is “an interesting instance of a throwback” (Doyle 1902/2003, 138). The same discourse informs the character of Jabez North, the arch-villain in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1860), a novel that alludes to Darwinism but also reflects on the social circumstances that produce criminals. Jabez emerges as an impostor and a murderer, but neither his twin brother nor his son turn out the same way. Unlike Galton’s failed photographic experiments, which resulted in the exact opposite of what they set out to achieve,5 the discovery of fingerprint patterns in the nineteenth century were successful, and once again, the twin’s path was to cross with that of the criminal. Galton tried to advance the cause of fingerprinting by arguing that fingerprints

Detecting Twins  145 served an important function of segmenting “rogues” from “men who are honest” (Galton 1892, 149). Today’s readers may wonder why Galton repeatedly stresses the need to implement such a system “in civilised lands” (ibid. 148). After all, it would seem obvious that the Victorians should have recognised the merits of fingerprinting as another example of the scientific gaze that encompassed the doctor’s microscope as well as Sherlock Holmes’s magnifying glass. However, the English were initially rather reluctant to embrace this method of identification, as it was very much associated with the ‘inferior’ colonial subject. Fingerprinting had proven crucial to the maintenance of colonial authority, the colonisers using any means at their disposal to identify and keep track of the local population: men and women whom they had trouble telling apart. Whereas in England, Galton explained, a signature and “personal introductions” usually sufficed in order to establish your credentials, the same was not true for the colonial world, where the natives were “mostly unable to sign” and had no features that were “readily distinguished by Europeans” (Galton 1892, 149). To this day, touching the black ink pad in order to have one’s prints taken can make one feel like a criminal, even without the association that would have preyed on the minds of Galton’s readers ‘at home’: that only the ‘mongrels’ and ‘niggers’ who were subjected to British rule had to be subjected to this method of identification; a grudging admission that those otherwise only thought of as faceless, animal-like creatures were, to some degree, individuals – they had to be in order to be considered litigable. This time, the same public that had applauded Galton’s efforts to catalogue curious twin cases was reluctant to follow his lead. Moreover, Galton could not really solve the twin conundrum that the fingerprint method presented him with (see Schwanebeck ­[forthcoming]), and since he did not deliver on his promise to reassess the twin problem by way of a bigger sample in his two follow-up publications on the subject, the most detailed investigation of the two topics in the late nineteenth century remains a literary one. In Puddn’head Wilson (1894), his “literary Galtonian twin study” (Salvant 2012, 370), Mark Twain employs fingerprinting as a plot gimmick to establish the protagonist’s identity in court. Like his forays into the fields of photography and heredity, Galton’s studies of fingerprints show that he was determined to link the fate of the twin with that of the criminal; in fact, criminology has frequently put them in direct juxtaposition, even in retrospect. The Alienist (2018), a mystery series set in late nineteenth-century New York City, examines the formative years of forensic psychology, and credits two fictitious twin brothers with the first concentrated efforts to introduce fingerprinting into police investigations – a fitting choice, given that both the twin and the criminal were ‘invented’ (at least in the modern senses of the respective words) at roughly the same time and in immediate proximity

146  Detecting Twins to one another. This does not mean the twin and the criminal are synonymous just because literary texts of the time frequently present one of the twin siblings as a criminal embodiment of the dark side of the soul. But their common lineage in Victorian discourses of science and criminology points to a shared epistemic link. Twins and criminals must be explored in conjunction because for Galton and his contemporaries, an understanding of the criminal also required an understanding of axioms that twin scholarship was crucial in bringing into existence: is it possible to distinguish between vital clues and ‘red herrings’ with absolute certainty, in spite of their similarities? Can you ever be sure ‘which is which’? Is criminal nature part of one’s hereditary baggage, and if so, how can the often rather diverse nature of twins and the co-presence of ‘evil’ and ‘benign’ siblings be accounted for? Victorian twin scholarship frequently intersects with Victorian criminology, which applies to their shared methodology, too. In studies of the nineteenth century, much has been made of Giovanni Morelli and his efforts to establish symptomatology as an accepted method in art history, a layman’s provocation of the establishment which was soon to inspire similar efforts on behalf of two other ‘failed medics’ of the era: Sigmund Freud and Arthur Conan Doyle, both of whom took their cue from Morelli when it came to inferring truth from seemingly inconspicuous details, which are frequently scrutinised under the magnifying glass in order to identify twins. The detective trying to segment those that look as though they just cannot be segmented thus pursues an almost existential project in the eyes of the Victorians, and his seemingly objective procedure does, in fact, already imply an ideologically tinged sense-making operation. Just like Galton, whose photographic attempt to detect criminals ended up quite literally “developing them” (Grimes 2006, 74), the authors of Victorian twin tales conduct experiments that subliminally conjure up fears that the surface structure of their texts tries to dispel. The simple labelling of the operative equipment no longer suffices in order to be sure, though some narratives pretend that it does. Similar to the Collins sisters in The Dark Mirror, who wear necklaces bearing their names, Tweedledum and Tweedledee have their names engraved on their collars (Fig. 5.3). Clearly, anyone who faces twins is a potential detective, no matter the genre. In Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Briony learns that Jackson and Pierrot can only be “distinguished by the fact that Pierrot was missing a triangle of flesh from his left ear lobe on account of a dog he had tormented when he was three” (11), and in Buster Keaton’s silent comedy The Playhouse (1921), the protagonist keeps confusing his sweetheart for her mean-spirited twin sister, until he paints an X on his girlfriend’s back (Fig. 5.4). The Farrelly brothers pile on the absurdity in their twin comedy, Stuck on You (2003), where an eyewitness has to pick out Siamese twins Walt and Bob from a police line-up otherwise consisting of singletons.

Detecting Twins  147

Fig. 5.3  L  abelling twins (The Dark Mirror and Through the Looking-Glass, details magnified).

Fig. 5.4  X marks the spot (The Playhouse).

Twins in Victorian Detective Fiction Detective fiction is by no means the only Victorian genre to feature twins. As the examples spread throughout this chapter have already illustrated, twins appear in a variety of other generic contexts. They present philosophical conundrums and oxymora (see Through the Looking-Glass), they permeate the colonial adventure story (see Rudyard Kipling’s Gemini of 1888), and they are at the centre of popular farces. Moreover, the semantic link between twins and subliminal fantasies about the ‘Other’ is not the exclusive domain of nineteenth-century fiction. At the turn of the millennium, postcolonial narratives have offered more nuanced ­revisions of the very same motif. Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000), for instance, plays a twist on the prevalent pattern by

148  Detecting Twins having Magid, Samad Iqbal’s twin son whom he sent off to Bangladesh to receive a ‘traditional’ education return as a secularised Englishman. In other twentieth-century texts, the imperial coordinates remain very much intact: Sam and Eric, in Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), seem well-adjusted but are then amongst the first to go native. Perhaps there is no genre that brings twinship and (post-)colonialism together as forcefully as the early Victorian detective story. This chapter emerged from the observation that twins appear with remarkable consistency in an astonishing number of texts that compete for the title of the first (British) detective novel. It is not my aim to settle the question of which book deserves this title, but rather to show that the literary co-presence of twins and detectives is more than mere coincidence and that the presence of twins in these stories hints at something more than just laziness on behalf of the authors of these mysteries, though critics like Van Dine or Knox would have us think otherwise. Contrary to their claims, the sheer corporeal presence of sibling doppelgangers is often quite incidental to the plot and does not prove crucial to the solution of the mystery. Though the confusion of one twin for the other frequently features in early detective narratives, their resolutions hardly warrant the stigma of the cliché that so many subsequent tales of detection use, including bestselling thrillers like Darcey Bell’s A Simple Favor (2017). Early detective narratives of the Victorian era may contain their fair share of implausible developments and unlikely resolutions, but they do not hinge on the simple fact of their protagonists being twins. Rather than have one sibling enter the scene at the last moment for a final-act twist (“She did not do it – her twin sister did it!”), the Victorian detective novel tells a different story. It is not as though their authors wrote themselves into a corner and, following dozens of twists and turns, had to produce twins in order to find their way out of the maze again and to reach closure; neither does Victorian literature investigate the legal complications that ensue when one of a pair of identical twin siblings is indicted in a court of law, some exceptions such as Kipling’s Gemini notwithstanding.6 It is rather as if the collective imaginary cannot separate twins from the spectre of crime, illegitimacy, and the taint of the Other, adding to the frequently observed phenomenon of the Victorian novel being haunted by an “unholy alliance” between “the dark forces of the oppressed underworld without and the repressed unconscious within” (Richardson 1945, xii). Twins access these narratives subliminally, as abject remnants of colonial crimes and of the atavistic spirits which haunt many Victorian mystery stories and which foreshadow “the larger, gradual disintegration of British hegemony” (Brantlinger 1990, 253). They also serve as heuristic aids for the detective characters that come into being in these formative years of the genre, supporting their basic, binary sense-making operations. Gilles Deleuze (2004) calls the

Detecting Twins  149 detective novel the most philosophical of all literary genres, in that it is all about ­knowing something with certainty, and in The Logic of Sense, he identifies this epistemological struggle and the idea of “‘making a difference’” as the ultimate project of modern philosophy (1990, 253). Crucially, twins are constantly on the verge of eluding the grasp of the detective and that of the detective story. They are more than what these narratives can contain, unfathomable and incomprehensible; the absolute certainty with which the detective formulates his abductions constantly about to collapse in the face of the uncanny twin, whose presence frequently reads like an element imported from the genre of psychological horror, which rests on much shakier ground in terms of epistemology. In Graham Greene’s The Case for the Defence (1939), the mere appearance of an identical twin is enough for the prosecution’s clear-cut case to collapse in court. That one of the suspicious twins, following the acquittal of the defendant, is run over by a bus, changes nothing: “if you were Mrs Salmon [the witness], could you sleep at night”, not knowing which twin brother died (Greene 1939/2005, 70)? Greene’s nightmarish conclusion indicates that the genre of horror and the possibility of uncanny moments of shock are never far off when crime fiction turns to twins. Their spectre haunts the (Neo-)Gothic imagination of the era like the ghost of Poe’s Madeline Usher, who rises from her grave to give her twin brother one of those tantalising twin embraces – and kills him. In The Trail of the Serpent, Braddon surrounds her twins with ghostly associations: on his death-bed, Jim threatens his brother with “ris[ing] out of my grave and haunt[ing] you” (Braddon 1860/2003, 90). Even Sherlock Holmes, the era’s embodiment of logic and reason, struggles to keep it together when he comes face to face with twins. His discovery of the corpse of Bartholomew Sholto in The Sign of Four is a moment of horror unrivalled in the Holmes canon, the terrible sight of the body rendered all the more gruesome by Watson’s narrative double-take: I stooped to the hole and recoiled in horror. […] Looking straight at me and suspended, as it were, in the air, for all beneath was in shadow, there hung a face – the very face of our companion Thaddeus. […] So like was the face to that of our little friend that I looked round at him to make sure that he was indeed with us. Then I ­recalled to mind that he had mentioned to us that his brother and he were twins. (Doyle 1890/2007, 45) The passage introduces the uncanny into a genre that usually insists it has no room for it. Even though the twinship of the Sholto brothers remains without consequence for the plot of Conan Doyle’s tale, it adds to the overall freakish character of this Holmes adventure, a ‘tunnel of horror’ where colonial savages and drug addicts await, and where “the

150  Detecting Twins comforting distinctions between occident and orient collapse” (Keep/ Randall 1999, 214). It is part of the detective novel’s agenda to pacify these fears and the evident ‘twin panic.’ Though there is no critical consensus on what exactly constitutes the very first example of detective fiction in the modern sense of the word, literary scholars usually agree that the Victorian age has to be credited with the inception of the genre (see Symons 1992, 38–57). The emergence of the literary detective follows some notable shifts in the organisation of the modern police force (see Scaggs 2005, 17–26), a development famously characterised by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish as a shift from sovereign towards disciplinary power, the essence of which Foucault sees embodied in the Panopticon: “a kind of laboratory of power” that “gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s behavior” (Foucault 1975/1979, 204). Before this shift occurred, crime literature frequently drew upon sensationalised ‘authentic’ accounts like the popular Newgate narratives: cautionary tales which were meant to drive home the point that crime did not pay but which still revelled in the horrible exploits of their notorious dramatis personae. With the gradual demise of this kind of literature and the emergence of the detective story also came a shift in the treatment of the twin motif: the allegorical twin was on his way out, and tales like the anonymously published The Twin Brothers; or, Virtue and Vice Contrasted (1802) gradually came to be replaced with more nuanced psychological works. The Twin Brothers is a didactic tale in the spirit of William Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747), and it recounts how the twin sons of Nottingham-based tradesman Mr. Tomkinson, “alike in nothing but their persons” (Anon. 1802, 6), pursue quite different paths in life. Bob is virtuous and ambitious, while Jack is a bully and a liar who, following a stint in Newgate prison, dies while on his way to Australia. “Surely, my young readers,” the narrator of this unapologetically didactic tale concludes, “I need make no comment on the Twin Brothers. You will see that Virtue is its own reward; and that Vice seldom fails to meet its appropriate punishment” (ibid. 124). It is a typical ending for the kind of crime narratives associated with the era of sovereign power in Foucault’s model, and the structural dualism of good and evil, of ‘natural’ virtue and corruption, lent itself naturally to the kind of ‘evil twin’ scenario frequently found in both Victorian and neo-Victorian tales of twinship. The most prominent twin novel of the era, Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, is framed by a quote from Darwin in which he voices his agreement with Galton’s conviction “that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of anyone, and that most of our qualities are innate” (Grand 1893/1992, 1), and Grand’s twin pair serves, first and foremost, to illustrate said point. Angelica and Diavolo, not quite as aptly named as it would initially appear, are thoroughly lacking in empathy and often play cruel practical jokes on their parents and teachers,

Detecting Twins  151

Fig. 5.5  Twins as quotation marks: the Grady sisters (The Shining) cast a long shadow.

for instance, by pretending to have undergone a body-switch experience or by reciting an apocalyptic ditty to showcase their diabolical nature. Usually, at least one of the twins is evil ab ovo and there is only so much (or, more accurately, nothing) that the environment can do. In the film adaptation of A Simple Favor (2018), the mother of the twins declares that one of her children “came straight from hell […]. Some children are just born rotten. They don’t need a parent, they need an exorcist”. The motif often resurfaces in popular horror fiction and in Neo-Victorian yarns about fatal genealogies. Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006) is a case in point: a Rebecca-inspired, bestselling tale of incest and identity theft amongst twins whose fate is sealed early on in the narrative: “[Emmeline] had the goodness of two children in her, and Adeline the wickedness of two” (81). The novel’s cover art evokes the iconic Grady twins in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), which underlines the novel’s citational qualities and its elaborate mash-up of Gothic and Victorian tropes. In fact, putting both images next to one another produces two sets of double quotation marks and invokes the emblem of iterability once again (Fig. 5.5). Fittingly, The Thirteenth Tale is a generic hybrid, part ‘haunted house’ horror, part analytic detective novel – a popular combination. Kelly Link’s short-story The Specialist’s Hat (1998) recounts how twin sisters Claire and Samantha are lured to the hereafter by their ghostly babysitter, until they are doomed to forever haunt the mansion of Eight Chimneys, while Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009) is a neo-Gothic pastiche of various twin tropes, including the bed-trick, mirror-twin syndrome, identity theft, and spectral appearances. In this London-set novel, one character dies, returns as a ghost, and successfully

152  Detecting Twins schemes to occupy the body of one of her own twin daughters and to steal her lover, a historian who attempts to investigate the dark family secrets. The co-presence of both literary paradigms – horror and detection – is strongly felt throughout the remainder of the Victorian era, but the rise of the detective almost eclipses it. Following the establishment of the Bow Street Runners and of London’s ‘New Police’ in 1829, the English public grew increasingly accustomed to the presence of “visible indicators of the power of the state” (Knight 2004, 30), a development that was soon reflected in the dramatis personae of literary publications. By the mid-nineteenth century, the first amateur detectives like Poe’s Auguste Dupin had entered the literary scene. Most of them went about their work in the urban space of the growing metropolis, as did the various policemen who were suddenly promoted to leading-man status across the media. Dickens’s journalistic pieces sing the praises of the “amicable brotherhood” of the police force (Dickens 1850/1997, 248), thus making the idea of the state-licensed investigator more attractive to readers, and efficient policemen like Inspector Bucket (Bleak House, 1853) soon populate not just the Dickensian oeuvre. In The Trail of the Serpent, mute detective Joseph Peters, an “utterly commonplace and unnoticeable” man (Braddon 1860/2003, 29), pursues ‘evil twin’ Jabez North, first as a member of the police force and later as a private investigator whose co-operation with the ‘Cherokee’ investigators prefigures Sherlock Holmes’s association with the Baker Street Irregulars. Braddon and Wilkie Collins arguably contributed more than Dickens to the rise of the literary ‘sleuth’ in the late nineteenth century (Scaggs 2005, 23–24), a development that was substantially aided by the emerging mystery genre joining forces with the fashionable sensationalist novel, which often adapted newspaper stories about crime and murder or juicy items from the divorce courts. This kind of material held a spell over British readers between the 1860s and the 1880s, the same period that saw the detective formula come into being before it would reach its apotheosis in Sherlock Holmes (Knight 2004, 55). The ‘Sensational ­Mania’ that London publications in part decried and in part helped create with their exaggerated reporting about the phenomenon derives from the very same embracing of popular, unofficial (sub)cultures that not only brought ventriloquism, ‘Wild West’ exhibitions, and magicians to the London stages (Flint 2012, 221), but also ‘freak shows’ like the popular Siamese twins acts. All of them aspire to the attention-grabbing qualities of the topical and the outrageous by way of looking back, that is: by alluding to a more primitive state of civilisation, with the explicit aim of exciting and shocking their audiences into strong affective responses (Allan 2013, 87). When Gothic elements were added this hotbed of wickedness and illicit desires (Nayder 2002, 177–178), it made for several uncanny twin encounters in the process. It is no coincidence that

Detecting Twins  153 the Usher siblings in Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher (1839) are twins, or that Bram Stoker precedes Dracula (1897) with The Dualitists (1887), a horrific twin tale that culminates in the massacre of a whole family and with the parents having “stakes driven through their middles to pin them down in their unhallowed graves till the Crack of Doom” (29). Interestingly, amongst the various twin stories of that period are several that are frequently included in discussions surrounding the formative years of the detective genre. I will discuss some of these books in more detail, but not all of them: While Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent, for instance, is a candidate for the title of the ‘first detective novel,’ it only includes the twin motif to set up Jabez North’s criminal history, as Jabez kills his twin to pass off the latter’s body as his own. I am including Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), even though it owes a bigger debt to the tradition of the sentimental novel and has contributed much less to the formation of the detective genre than the author’s more well-known mysteries, The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). But it contains many elements of the detection plot and is brimming with narrative tropes that will later be deemed characteristic of the genre. Like Charles Dickens’s unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), it testifies to a genre gradually emerging, utilising twins in order to establish its epistemic agenda. Though Collins and Dickens were arguably the most popular and successful novelists of their time, it is safe to assume that neither Poor Miss Finch nor Edwin Drood ranks amongst their most celebrated works. Both seem to veer a little too close to popular tastes and include a number of typical elements of the sensational novel: jealousy, adultery, deception, duplicity, intrigue, fraud, and murder (Pykett 1994, 4). The same is true of Charles Warren Adams’s The Notting Hill Mystery (1865),7 which was for a long time only a name to insiders and did not receive any critical attention. The publication dates of these books span nearly a decade, they clearly bear the imprint of popular literary tastes of their time, and they provide us with three different constellations: fraternal twins, identical brothers, and identical sisters.

The Notting Hill Mystery: Mesmeric Bonds For a long time, The Notting Hill Mystery only existed as a footnote in the annals of detective fiction. Julian Symons had dug up one of the few remaining copies to argue for its historical significance,8 yet it was only in 2012 that the book became widely available again. Contemporary critics were astonished to rediscover a forgotten contender for the title of the first British detective novel, one that already contains several staples of the genre: facsimiles of official documents, maps, fragments of letters, and eye-witness statements, one of them – curiously – even given by a Dr. Watson.

154  Detecting Twins The bulk of the narrative is framed by a letter written by Ralph Henderson, an insurance investigator who is the closest thing to a detective figure the novel affords. Henderson does not actually participate in the action and only abandons his position as an external observer occasionally in order to explain how he assembled the material. Even when Henderson presents his conclusion in the final section of the book, he leaves it to his addressee, the secretary of an anonymous Life Insurance Association, to reach a verdict on the basis of all the material: letters, diary extracts, and witness testimonies. In this respect, the book follows the mosaic arrangement of The Woman in White (see Casey 2006, 3–4). Although it is heavy on polyphony and leaves it to the reader to deliver a verdict on the case, Henderson’s account does not leave much room for doubt when it comes to the identification of the likely culprit. This clearly is not yet a whodunit, as we are never encouraged to question the guilt of the most obvious suspect, and the fun for the reader lies in the novel’s Columbo qualities: “we know the identity of the villain, but we must work out how the investigator will prove his case” (Kerridge 2012). Henderson has been tasked with investigating the mysterious death of Madame R**, whose husband, the Baron R**, has drawn up an insurance policy on his wife’s life and intends to cash it in. Henderson looks into the circumstances of Madame R**’s death and immediately teases his addressees with a conclusion that is completely “at variance with all the most firmly established laws of nature” (Adams 1865/2012, 6), which underlines that The Notting Hill Mystery is as indebted to the police procedural as it is to the tropes of sensational fiction and of the Victorian Gothic: madness, murders, doubles, dark family secrets, and suspicious foreigners with dubious designs on English women. Moreover, the fragmented state of its narrative material also seems to comply with sensational literature’s alleged tendency to weaken its reader’s attention span (see Allan 2013). The novel is characterised by an ongoing struggle between ­rationality, as embodied by the meticulousness of Henderson (who, in an aside to the reader, admits to having considered submitting the events “in a tabular form,” 136), and the sphere of hypnosis, animal magnetism, and clairvoyance. This allows The Notting Hill Mystery to acquire a genuine degree of meta-reflexivity regarding the two major novelistic paradigms at work here. Whereas the detective novel, at least in its generic form as it gradually emerged over the subsequent decades, tends to dispel all fears of the supernatural by way of rationalistic thought and a distinctly secularised content matter, the sensation novel shows how “the horrific or disquieting presence of the supernatural” intrudes into the realm of the ordinary (Flint 2012, 221). The same critics who would later frown upon the use of twins as a means of resolving the plot also explicitly forbid the presence of supernatural elements in the detective story, and The Notting Hill Mystery would probably have failed their standards and, to some extent, is likely to leave contemporary readers frustrated. However, the

Detecting Twins  155 telepathic bonds and forces of animal magnetism that stretch the contemporary reader’s credulity were not wholly alien to the Victorians, who were accustomed to the spectacle of its scientific community engaging in a fierce debate about the merits of mesmerism (see Zwierlein 2005, 182–183). This was one of several pseudo-sciences to be temporarily accepted in nineteenth-century Britain and proved immensely beneficial for the creation of psychoanalysis and modern psychology (see Bersani 2011). Though it gradually illuminates the conspiracy, The Notting Hill Mystery does not deliver closure in the way contemporary readers may expect from the genre. Instead of the detective’s triumph over the actual culprit, we are left with a rather wild solution: Henderson compiles evidence and testimonies to prove that Baron R** has killed his wife by administering poison to her twin sister, with whom she shares a telepathic bond, and if this brief summary already sounds outrageous, it does not even include several other improbable events, including a child abduction, an unlikely reunion of twins separated as children, hypnosis, and somnambulism. Henderson begins his presentation of the case with the reconstruction of the late Madame R**’s troubled family history, leaving it up to the reader to connect the individual dots and to conclude that Madame R** was the daughter of the late Gertrude Boleton, who passed away when giving birth to twins. The medical case history, as reported by friends and relatives of the family, indicates that the Boleton sisters present an example of twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a prenatal condition that frequently results in one sibling ending up as the malnourished, less developed one, with “poor Gertie especially looking like a faded lily” (Adams 1865/2012, 25). The fact that the twins struggle for physical well-being in the womb serves as an important precondition for the murder plan, which depends on the interconnectedness of their physiques. Yet their guardian reports instances of a “wonderful sympathy” between them, a bond that is, interestingly, “more physical than mental,” as “every little ailment that affects the one is immediately felt also by the other” (ibid. 26). Having set up the twins as tragic orphans, the plot only has to add the uncertain state of the family fortune of more than 25,000 pounds before it descends into utter sensationalism, aided by stylistic flourishes which are reminiscent of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.9 Catherine is abducted by gipsies, leaving fragile Gertrude as the sole survivor of the family line and heiress to the family fortune, though fate, or rather literary convention, leads to the two sisters crossing paths once more. Gertrude has married Mr. Anderton, an equally fragile person of a great nervous disposition, and their infertile union embodies some of the Victorians’ worst fears regarding the pathological barrenness, degeneracy, and death-in-life appearance of its elite, which seems genetically unfit for reproduction. Although the marriage remains childless, it appears to be a happy one, until Gertrude starts to suffer from mysterious attacks, the nature of which the novel leaves unexplained. It is a deliberately obscure mixture

156  Detecting Twins of the various nervous ailments that the Victorian female body was riddled with in the eyes of the medical establishment. When medical treatments fail to rid Gertrude of her hysteric condition, the Andertons turn to mesmerism in order to find a cure.10 Enter Baron R**, “one of the most powerful mesmerists in Europe” in the eyes of his supporters (Adams 1865/2012, 41) but an outright impostor according to others. He enjoys an immediate rapport with his patient, alternately sending “glow[s]” and “cold shudder[s]” through her body (ibid. 68 and 93). In the Baron’s affiliation with animal magnetism, The Notting Hill Mystery shows itself to be a topical novel that cunningly exploits some of the mesmerist’s “spectacular (in every sense of the word) trendiness” (Poznar 2008, 414). Unlike other occult fashions of the era, mesmerism proved rather persistent: the British public remained spellbound (no pun intended) by mesmerists until the end of the nineteenth century, when George du Maurier published Trilby (1894). Its charismatic villain, Svengali, is clearly modelled on Baron R**, a literary debt hitherto unacknowledged, even though the connection is quite obvious. Before taking up novel-writing in the last decade of his life, du Maurier had been one of the most prolific cartoonists and illustrators of the Victorian era, and he had contributed illustrations to The Notting Hill Mystery’s serialised run (see Cooke 2014). The most popular constellation of literary mesmerism is prefigured in Adams’s novel: that of the charismatic manipulator who acts as the dangerous seducer of a female subject. It reveals a considerable degree of patriarchal anxiety, and the scandalous accounts of ‘Occult Women’ who willingly subjected themselves to the mesmerist hype betray considerable unease regarding the menstrual cycle and the allegedly sexual ­deficiency of the ‘hysteric woman’ (see Basham 1992, vii–ix). According to Nina Auerbach, the image of the three strong-willed ‘seducers’ Svengali, Dracula, and Freud leaning “hungrily over three mesmerized and apparently characterless women” is one of the key tableaus of the era (1981, 283), and The Notting Hill Mystery proves quite a prophetic text in this respect, prefiguring Trilby’s slavish relationship to Svengali as well as Madeleine Guipet’s dependency on the famous mesmerist Émile Magnin. Both of them find their prototype in Baron R**, who always dresses in black and gazes at his environment with a pair of ­“extraordinary,” “very dark” eyes (Adams 1865/2012, 64–65). Soon, he has G ­ ertrude convinced [w]hat a wonderful thing this mesmerism is! To think that the mere touch of another person’s hand should soothe away pain, and fill one with health and strength. […] [T]he lady pops her little, dry, monkey-looking paw upon my forehead, and presto! the headache has vanished. (Ibid. 70–71)

Detecting Twins  157 Unbeknownst to Gertrude, the ‘lady’ in question is her own twin sister Catherine, who has long left the gipsy camps and is now married to the Baron, assisting him as a medium. Henderson reasons that sheer coincidence brought the sisters together again, but that the Baron was the only one to recognise the family connection, which paradoxically makes him the more successful investigator for the majority of the novel. Like Sherlock Holmes, who will enter the literary scene more than two decades later, the Baron is an expert on science, regularly experiments with chemicals, lives without sleep, meticulously takes down dates to keep track of his investigations, and relies on a helpful network of servants to acquire information. Needless to say, though, as the villain of the piece, he is also the detective’s antithesis, turning the mesmeric phenomenon of ‘eating by deputy’ into his plan to administer poison to his own wife in order to kill her twin sister. With the other heirs out of the way, he is free to claim the whole Boleton fortune; his fate remains unresolved, however. Out of all the Victorian twin novels examined here, The Notting Hill Mystery claims the singularly most supernatural bond between the twins, depicting them as soul-mates. The extraordinary sympathy between the sisters that is so frequently noted throughout the novel even impacts their health, and it is to the novel’s credit that it leaves one aspect open for interpretation: whether or not Gertrude’s improving health is really down to ‘magnetic forces’ or due to her being reunited with her twin sister, the latter phenomenon having frequently been observed in twin studies (see Watson 1982, 80–87).11 Linking the twin with the idea of the telepathic bond was an idea very much of its day and would later inspire the inflationary folie à deux diagnosis popularised in the 1870s by two French physicians, who noted that the “‘morbid interpsychology’ of unrelated people” could lead to shared insane beliefs, a phenomenon which they modelled on “the possibly pathological likemindedness of twins” (Schwartz 1996, 44). Charles Mackay, in his 1887 psychological romance, The Twin Soul, has his narrator fantasise about magnetism “between persons of congenial tastes and studies, which sometimes declares itself with the suddenness of the lightning flash” (23). The first stage version of Peter Pan (1904) includes some musings on the same topic, with Peter advising the twin brothers amongst his lost boys “[not] to dream differently, being twins, you know” (Barrie 1904/1995, 107). The fact that The Notting Hill Mystery is the most unapologetic proponent of the paradigm of the sensation novel discussed here does not mean that it is alone in suggesting telepathic twin powers. Poor Miss Finch attributes them to its charismatic villain, Nugent Dubourg, while The Mystery of Edwin Drood assigns dual consciousness to a variety of characters, including the stern school-mistress, Miss Twinkleton. Not only does she carry a trace of twinship in her name, but she releases her alter ego each night once her pupils have been sent off to bed, in a

158  Detecting Twins manner akin to the boozing millionaire in Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), who remembers none of his nightly escapades once he has sobered up: As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal m ­ agnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. (Dickens 1870/2002, 24) Edwin Drood’s very own Svengali, however, is its opium-addicted ­villain, Jasper, who holds a mesmeric spell over Rosa,12 a quality that implicitly aligns this reluctant pairing with the novel’s twins, Helena and Neville Landless, whose unspoken agreement is a riddle to everyone around them. Not only does Reverend Crisparkle frequently have the impression “that in teaching one [of them], he was teaching two” (ibid. 99), Neville even claims a spiritual bond between them: “a complete understanding can exist between my sister and me, though no spoken word – perhaps hardly as much as a look – may have passed between us” (65). Dickens’s novel has tremendous fun with this concept, not just on the level of the story but also regarding that of narrative transmission – at one point, the narrative voice indulges in ‘telepathic communication,’ reporting a snippet of dialogue only to reveal that it was actually just an unspoken thought (222). While Dickens includes the twins as prime suspects, their innocence is never questioned in Adams’s book. Given the sensationalist set-up of the novel, it comes as a bit of a surprise how quickly The Notting Hill Mystery disposes of the twin sisters once they have done their duty to the plot, and how it exonerates them, pinning all the guilt on the Baron. Twentieth-century horror fiction, both in literature and on screen, was to properly revise this constellation. Horror films, in particular, are infatuated with female identical twins and often use them in their neoGothic versions of classic detection plots, where horrifying secrets are uncovered in the characters’ past and become manifest in uncanny twin encounters. Gothic superstition appears to be lost on Henderson, but this does not make him a fully enlightened, rational character; it is more of a hint that Baron R** absorbs Henderson’s entire attention and casts his mesmeric spell over the narrative, even though, or rather because, like Dracula, he only exists in intradiegetic witness testimony, never allowed to speak for himself. Ultimately, Henderson’s biased perspective on the arch-villain lets the sisters off the hook rather easily, as their spiritual bond, while never properly resolved or explained, is accepted as a benign phenomenon and as a supernaturally tinged version of stereotypically feminine traits like empathy and sensitivity. The novel’s subtext,

Detecting Twins  159 however, hints at a more troubling conceptualisation of twinship. After all, does the narrative not suggest that Catherine takes very naturally both to the gipsy milieu and to the mesmeric transactions in which her husband involves her? And does the marriage to Gertrude, the other twin, not prove to be Mr. Anderton’s downfall? All the witnesses whom Henderson consults may insist that it is Gertrude’s ‘ill-adapted’ husband who brings about her hysteria, yet given the accounts of her fragile health as a child, this narrative can be easily inverted to argue that it is Anderton who contracts the seed of his demise from his wife. It is not my intention to argue against the official solution to the crime as presented by Henderson, tempting as it may be to follow Pierre ­Bayard’s ‘detective criticism’ and his revisions of canonical whodunits, most of which happen in the spirit of ‘cherchez la femme’ and pin the crimes on women who exist on the margins of the narrative. There is certainly no indication that anyone but Baron R** is behind the scheme here, but it is interesting to note that, as a detective, Henderson and his eye-witnesses are incapable of scrutinising the Boleton sisters without resorting to clichéd scripts of passivity, like ‘the orphan,’ ‘the hysteric woman,’ or ‘the dying swan,’ as the account is structured by one sister’s abduction and the other one’s illness. Henderson appears content to employ the twins as index signs that point towards a culprit whom he has earmarked right from the beginning: the devilish foreigner with the illegitimate designs on an English fortune. The direct juxtaposition of the Baron’s mesmerism and twinship in what is widely believed to be one of the first detective novels is worth noting for a variety of reasons. Straightaway, the genre taps into subliminal anxieties, even though the detective paradigm is not yet stable enough to counterbalance otherworldly and spiritual threats, and the investigator still lacks the charisma of later iconic detectives. In the face of the evidence that he reluctantly accumulates, he can only attempt to dispel his own anxieties by clinging to bureaucratic protocol and to the call of duty. Exhibiting the repetitive behaviour of an obsessive-­ compulsive, Henderson repeatedly lays out “the various links by which the circumstances, already detailed, are connected into a single chain” (Adams 1865/2012, 206), and his own hunch that this chain might indicate the presence of the supernatural betrays panic in the face of the unfathomable. Like Edwin Drood, The Notting Hill Mystery suggests that the earliest examples of the genre deny the notion of free will and agency and thus contradict the genre’s subsequent key epistemic claims (Cohn 2015, 254). Furthermore, The Notting Hill Mystery suggests the direction the twin novel was taking in order to cope with its own subliminal anxieties. It would increasingly displace them on to the body of the Other and upon the imperial map. I have already offered a glimpse of this in Chapter 3 when I discussed Derrick’s play Twins, which associates both

160  Detecting Twins of the Spinach brothers with ‘Hindoos’: a swarm of little children for Timothy and colonial subjects for his brother Titus, the Reverend who plans to exhibit Rampunkah, his native servant, as a “striking example of the mollifying influence of British culture in the far East” (Derrick 1884/1910, 12). The play scores some easy laughs from perpetuating all the worst stereotypes about the colonised subject, and it even subjects Rampunkah to some classic ‘slave whacking,’ with the questionable outcome that the villain of the piece is partly forgiven and re-integrated into the community, while Rampunkah, who remains inconsequential with regard to the plot development, is kicked off the stage in the very same scene. The play’s subtext is more difficult to accommodate, however: the family butler may be panicked at the thought of “be[ing] contaminated” by the “heathens” (Derrick 1884/1910, 11), yet the colonial revenant Professor Spinach and his hard-drinking brother are shown to be much more corrupt and lascivious. Unlike the novels by Collins and Dickens (or, indeed, Derrick’s play), The Notting Hill Mystery does not directly address the topic of colonialism, yet it is already haunted by its spectre, rendering Catherine, the twin who was abducted by gipsies, as the distinctly more ‘oriental’ of the two. Her guardian, Mr. Ward, is the first one to remark upon her “dark, gipsy-like complexion, and black eyes and hair” (Adams 1865/2012, 29), features that later allow her to blend in with the circus milieu as well as with the exotic circle of the Baron.13 Mesmerism bears no obvious link to imperialism, but it is part of the discourse surrounding the imperial Gothic, in that it momentarily disrupts the thin crust of civilisation (LaCoss 2007, 61). The numerous doubles that permeate nineteenth-century literature are formed under the impression of animal magnetism, hypnosis and telepathy, and the parallel flourishing of occultism and imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century has led Patrick Brantlinger to read them as immediate allies. Both serve as “ersatz religions” in the allegedly secular Victorian age, and both articulate anxieties regarding the danger of atavistic regression into barbarism and savagery (Brantlinger 1990, 229–230). From here on, the mystery genre will gradually discipline itself and demand increasingly rational solutions.

Poor Miss Finch: The Colonial Taint Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch, which I am discussing elsewhere in a chapter on surfaces and tactile anxieties as a Victorian preoccupation (see Schwanebeck [forthcoming]), has never found much love with critics nor with Collins’s usual audience. While it toys with mystery elements, it sits more comfortably in the realm of the sensation novel, with its blind heroine and her two suitors, twins Oscar and Nugent Dubourg, providing the most elementary character set-up of melodrama: a virtuous heroine, a dutiful yet naive hero, and a charismatic villain who propels the

Detecting Twins  161 plot (Williams 2012, 203). Though the Dubourg brothers, who compete for Lucilla Finch’s affection, do not stem from the colonies, much of the novel’s outrageous plotting is devoted to aligning them with the darktinged Other. When Oscar moves into the neighbourhood, Madame Pratolungo, Lucilla’s friend and the narrator of the novel, speculates that he must be “a criminal escaped from the Assizes” (Collins 1872/2008, 23). There is indeed a criminal history to be unearthed here, though it is of a different kind than the narrator anticipates. In an episode that strongly resonates with the involvement of the Landless twins in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Oscar narrowly escapes a conviction for murder, and his intradiegetic, almost Hitchcockian account of how the court nearly had him wrongly tried for killing a carpenter has much to recommend it as an early example of analytical detective fiction. Oscar’s brother, who later emerges as the villain of the novel, does the detecting in order to prove his brother’s innocence, and the grateful twin’s enthusiastic rhetoric anticipates some of Dr. Watson’s characteristic worm’s-eye perspective at the infallibility of larger-than-life Sherlock Holmes. Nugent’s assembling of the case arguably shows many elements which will only a few years later become intrinsically linked with the detective novel; it is interesting to note that, like in The Notting Hill Mystery, it is the villain of the piece who exhibits the most stellar detection skills. There is the presentation of “the defence called an ‘alibi’”, a word no reader would require an explanation for two decades later, the “stoppage of the watch at half-past eight” that nearly incriminates the wrong man, and plenty of “good circumstantial evidence” (ibid. 42–43).14 As Oscar’s account of the murder case testifies, the genesis of the mystery novel’s characteristic idiom comes with its own history of twinning: words drawn to each other by way of collocation, to be forever stuck as the clichéd phrase that would haunt hundreds of subsequent detective novels, not just the “blunt instrument” that burglars use to hurt Oscar (ibid. 84), but also the “red herring” which Rector Finch asks his wife to prepare for him (100). The idiomatic meaning of the phrase was only to emerge later, yet it is a remarkable coincidence that the red herring should also make a cameo appearance in the kitchen of Detective Peters in Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (45). The majority of Collins’s novel does not play out like a detective novel, yet it returns to the genre’s characteristic structure and tone on several occasions, including the elaborate, telegraph-aided search for Oscar in various seaports with the help of a private investigator. In a scene midway through the narrative, Madame Pratolungo confronts Nugent about his odd behaviour, and he eventually comes clean about his feelings regarding Lucilla: he has secretly been in love with his brother’s fiancée. The scene has much in common with the typical revelation scene of the detective novel; as he edges her on to re-interpret past events in the light of his infatuation with Lucilla, Nugent demonstrates to Pratolungo that

162  Detecting Twins it is all about interpreting ambiguous clues and situations correctly. What ensues is an almost Socratic conversation that very much resembles the dialogue between the detectives and their dim-witted assistants, with Nugent providing tags in order to perform an epistemological midwife service for Pratolungo: “Did you fail to understand everything that followed?” (284) “How is it that you never even asked me what I meant?” (285) “Surely, even your eyes must have seen through me on that occasion!” (287) It is not just by virtue of his cunning that Nugent emerges as Oscar’s polar opposite in many respects. Indeed, the narrator herself comments upon the complementary nature of the twin brothers: Oscar and his “delicately-strung nerves” find their exact opposite in Nugent and his “vigorously constituted nerves” (274). Galton was busy gathering his empirical observations on the complementarity of twins at about the same time as when Collins composed his novel, and his History of Twins includes cases like that of the man who was “practical, mathematical, and linguistic,” whereas his brother was “contemplative, poetical, and literary” (qtd. in Galton 1875, 575). As utterly complementary characters, the Dubourg brothers are Victorian literature’s most vivid illustration of this twin stereotype, with Nugent’s dashing appearance all but annihilating the presence of his timid sibling. Nugent’s entrance into the novel is that of a charismatic con man, and Madame Pratolungo cannot help but be smitten with this “irresistible man” and his aura of “ ­ gentleman-like confidence” (Collins 1872/2008, 135). The confidence trick is also played upon the reader, who is encouraged to bury all unease regarding this colourful character by way of solidar­ ugent should immediately antagonise the pompous Rector ity. That N is enough for us, as it is for Madame Pratolungo, to forget that he has squandered his part of the family fortune on a bohemian existence as a failed painter: “The dignity of labour was a dignity unknown to these degraded young men” (52). These passages also make the narrative view-point of Collins’s book all but inevitable: con men narratives are most efficient when the con man is not prone to introspection, and the symbiotic twins who require no other confidantes in the course of the novel feel no need to narrate, except, of course, when they are incomplete. In the novel’s most melodramatic turn of events, Oscar begins to develop epileptic fits shortly after his engagement to Lucilla, and the only

Detecting Twins  163 cure to afford him substantial relief consists in silver nitrate – a remedy which has the unwelcome side-effect of turning his skin blue. This discolouration would not present a problem if Collins’s protagonists immediately resorted to cornball wisdom of the ‘love is blind’ variety (see Schwanebeck [forthcoming]), but in spite of her condition, Lucilla has an instinctive dislike of dark colours. In the imperialist context of high Victorianism, particularly after the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the subtext of this aversion is all too clear, yet the uncomfortable association of Lucilla’s inclination with racism is spelt out for us nevertheless, when Lucilla recalls that the mere proximity of a ‘Hindoo’ is enough to terrify her and to give her visions of “brown demons” (Collins 1872/2008, 118). It is for this reason that Oscar, having undergone his “symbolic transformation in race” (Nayder 2003, 267), keeps his condition a secret from her and pretends that his twin is afflicted by it. This necessitates a roleswitch when Lucilla, in yet another unlikely turn of events, temporarily regains her eyesight. The heroine’s prophecy, that were she ever to marry “a man with a dark complexion […], I should run away from him” (Collins 1872/2008, 74), is thus fulfilled, only that it is Oscar’s, as the novel’s damsel-in-distress, who does the running. In its attempts to set things right and to dissolve all tensions into a thoroughly whitewashed tableau of domestic bliss, the novel’s ending overcompensates. Lucilla comes to terms with Oscar’s condition and soon gives birth to a (white) child, allowing for the subtexts of interracial love and miscegenation to be ­displaced. Nugent, who is actually the more dark-complexioned one of the twins, volunteers to go into exile in order to atone for his crimes, and he not only picks the former colonies as his destination, but freezes to death on-board a ship in Alaska while clutching a lock of Lucilla’s hair – a grotesque emblem of the book’s almost hysteric insistence that everything is all right and all-white again. The novel’s subliminal attempts to complicate the generic set-up and the binary oppositions between the twins – virtuous Oscar versus roguish Nugent – belie these attempts to clear everything up. It is not only Madame Pratolungo’s moral compass that is way off when she is around the twins; the novelistic subtext itself argues that Lucilla’s eventual reconciliation to Oscar’s condition cannot gloss over the fact that the association with the ‘dark’ must inevitably wear off and lead to a mild case of going native, as “submissive Oscar” (179) begins to “whisper savagely” (213) and to unleash “hidden reserves of strength” (386). The ending of the novel may insist that the ‘evil twin’ can be disposed of and that all the wickedness in the world can be “condensed into the figure of a person who can then be defeated, punished, or expunged” (Williams 2012, 204), yet a seed of Nugent’s temperament certainly takes root in appropriately named Dimchurch, a town that the bohemian urbanite Nugent abhors with all the might of the demonic twin. Chances are that Lucilla, as wife of Oscar and as mother of ‘little

164  Detecting Twins Nugent,’ will find herself caught up in “a forest of hovering figures, with faces of black-blue” again (Collins 1872/2008, 160), her affliction hinting at what was known to the Victorians as the ‘blue devil’: a severe depression.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Imperial Abjection The Mystery of Edwin Drood is by no means the only Dickens text featuring twins, but it is the only one to include them amongst its principal cast. Dickens’s novel precedes Collins’s Poor Miss Finch by more than a year, yet ironically, it has often been perceived as a Collins rip-off or at least as a pronounced emulation of the latter’s trademark style. Following the success of The Moonstone, the English literary landscape produced a whole series of mystery tales to rival Collins’s bestselling books, and Edwin Drood was part of that wave. It may be understandable that Dickens, following the critical reception of Our Mutual Friend (1865) and a five-year absence from the genre of the novel, would try to “retaliate against Collins by creating his version of a taut, sensational novel” (Paroissien 2002, xxiii). The novel’s central mystery concerns the disappearance and likely murder of young Edwin Drood, the details of whose fate still represent one of the most widely disputed gaps in literary history. Dickens died in 1870, having completed only half the book and without leaving behind any definitive written instructions as to how it was to conclude. A number of critics assume that he did not conceive of the novel as an immensely complex whodunit and that he intended to reveal the most obvious suspect to be the killer, Edwin’s uncle John Jasper,15 who is earmarked as a villain from the beginning: addicted to opium and lusting for Edwin’s fiancée, Rosa. Speculations about Jasper’s guilt have inspired various attempts to complete or radically rewrite the novel. These efforts include Rupert Holmes’s ‘solve-it-yourself’ musical adaptation (1985), where the audience gets to vote who did it, and Fruttero & Lucentini’s La verità sul caso D. (The D. Case, 1989), which sees famous literary detectives debate the case.16 Much of this fervour no doubt derives from the resolve of devoted Dickensians to make a case for Drood, a novel that exhibits relatively little of the author’s usual strengths or his remarkable wit, to be more complex and deep than it has often been given credit for, even though it is widely assumed that Dickens’s ambitions did not go beyond trying “to out-Collins Collins” (McKnight 2013, 61). His inclusion of twin siblings Helena and Neville Landless is certainly part of this agenda. Like in Poor Miss Finch, the fate of the twins becomes intertwined with that of the protagonist, though the ensuing conflict is more complex than Lucilla’s simple ‘Will she, won’t she?’ conundrum: more of a love

Detecting Twins  165 rectangle than a triangle. The arrival of the twins instantly leads Edwin and Rosa to end their engagement and to rethink their relationship; they end up wooing the twins while, at the same time, emulating their bond: “Let us change to brother and sister from this day forth” (Dickens 1870/2002, 146). Having called off their engagement, Rosa and Edwin suddenly share a passionate kiss that mirrors the intense, borderline incestuous physical affection between the Landless twins. This is not the only correspondence between the twins in these novels: they are all orphans, sharing a fate that invokes a significant portion of the classical mythological baggage. Neville’s account of the Landless twins’ wretched upbringing in Ceylon evokes various well-known pre-texts, all of which stress the dubious origins of twin siblings. It is fitting that, of the three novels discussed in greater detail here, Edwin Drood should be the only one to feature twins who were actually born in the colonies, as the Landless twins are also the only fraternal twins to be discussed in this chapter. Ever since the ancients, this type of pairing has been associated with the underlying fear that the twins may have committed incest inside the womb, and the idea of ‘unclean’ meddling and the delivery of an unholy couple into a world that is completely unprepared for the twins’ degree of corruption also permeate The Mystery of Edwin Drood. At the same time, Dickens is ahead of the competition in that he does not uncritically adapt the myth. Unlike Poor Miss Finch or The Trail of the Serpent, Edwin Drood is not about guilty twins, but about how guilt is bestowed upon the twin as a result of instinctive, irrational dislike. Having grown up as orphans in the colonies, Helena and Neville Landless arrive in England to be subjected to a ‘proper’ education, though their destination is by no means the seething urban metropolis Dickens’s readership may expect. In fact, Cloisterham, “a city of another and bygone time” according to the narrator (Dickens 1870/2002, 23), and a place brimming with derelict buildings, has more in common with ancient Egypt, the diluted school-book version of which Rosa and Edwin ridicule as “[t]iresome old burying-grounds” (31). Yet even in ancient Cloisterham where everything is “of the past” (23), most notably the strikingly medieval environment of churchtowers and crypts, the arrival of the twins has all the impact of a colonial throwback, which occurs so often in British literature of the time. Neville and Helena crash into the home of Reverend Crisparkle like Nugent Dubourg into the Dimchurch rectory, and as though to drive home the point that the devil himself has descended upon a God-fearing rural community, both novels include a clergyman’s bemused reaction upon having met the twins. While Mr. Finch is “thunderstruck” by Nugent’s provocative entry (­Collins 1872/2008, 135), Reverend Crisparkle is almost rendered speechless by Neville’s provocative behaviour: “You shock me; unspeakably shock me” (Dickens 1870/2002, 62). The description of

166  Detecting Twins the twins, focalised through the eyes of the Reverend, immediately establishes their status as outsiders in the community of Cloisterham: An unusually handsome lithe young fellow, and an unusually handsome lithe girl; much alike; both very dark, and very rich in colour; she of almost the gipsy type, something untamed about them both; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers. (58) Their dark complexion and overall exotic appearance comes courtesy of their having been brought up in Ceylon, one of the many outposts of the British East India Company. Thus, the narrative immediately tints Neville and Helena with an “oriental otherness” that lends them a distinct “aura of difference” (Perera 2012, 202). Edwin feels an immediate sexual attraction to ‘gipsy’ Helena, whose sensual appearance is not solely focalised through the male characters of the book. Even Rosa is struck by her “lustrous gipsy-face,” her “bosom,” her “wild black hair,” and her “dark eyes” (Dickens 1870/2002, 71). Yet the very same qualities provoke a totally different reaction in Edwin when he stands in front of Helena’s twin brother, to whom he takes an immediate dislike. Edwin’s uninhibited racism leads him to insult Neville with a racial slur during one of their first encounters, and the latter, in return, flings some wine at him – an outburst that will make him a prime suspect when Edwin disappears. Neville thus finds himself enacting one of the detective novel’s most popular stereotypes: that of the patsy against whom all the circumstantial evidence piles up. Soon, everyone remembers Neville’s violent temper, a self-fulfilling prophecy that mirrors Galton’s idea of producing photographs of likely criminals a priori: “I hope Mr Neville may come to good, but I don’t believe he will”, Mrs. Crisparkle declares (Dickens 1870/2002, 99). When the search for a scapegoat gets underway in Cloisterham, the clues pointing in Neville’s direction accumulate. Experienced readers of detective fiction cannot help but think how the twins seem almost exonerated by “such heavy-handed, clumsy ‘evidence’ as their Oriental origins, their possible ‘mixed blood,’ [or] their ‘wildness” (Fruttero/Lucentini 1889/1992, 144–145), but when Mayor Sapsea, with typically imperial fervour, reasons that the whole case has “an Un-English complexion” about it (Dickens 1870/2002, 171–172), he seems quite sure of Neville’s guilt. Interestingly, he has his eyes on only one of the twins: unlike her brother, Helena is deemed fit for a gentle transition into the English marriage market because her likely liaison with Edwin bears far less potential for conflict than Neville’s desire for Rosa. She may have “a slumbering flame of fire in the intense dark eyes” that resonates with her brother’s striking features, but this is a fire that appears to be under control, “softened” as it is “with compassion”

Detecting Twins  167 (71), indicating her likely subjection to Victorian ideals of femininity and the reproductive cycle – as a result, Rosa is soon accepted as the properly house-trained one of the Landless siblings. Crisparkle’s hope that Helena, by virtue of her “wisdom of Love,” may “overcome in him ­[ Neville]” what she “overcame in [her]self” (108) is echoed in the public pity for Neville’s “poor sister” (183). The people of Cloisterham, we may infer, fear the same demons lurking within Neville that erupt in the Dubourg brothers in Poor Miss Finch. Neville himself admits that having been “brought up among abject and servile dependants, of an inferior race” may have led to his having “contracted some affinity with them,” like “a drop of what is tigerish in their blood” (64). The metaphor of the wild animal follows Neville around like a leitmotif,17 and within the logic of Victorian science, that is: viewed through the prism of Darwinism and degeneracy, there is always the fear that the savage beast may come to the fore at any time. This would assign the role of animal-tamer to Helena, but the novel’s conjugal and economic subtexts easily dispel all illusions that the English body politic can be safely separated from the influx of the foreign. Edwin Drood illustrates that the “mixing of blood and money” is well underway in the nineteenth century, so much so that the foreign is already intrinsically tied to the English (Tromp 2013, 53). This makes Edwin Drood a novel of transition in several senses of the word: one that blurs the lines between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ and one that foreshadows fragmented accounts of imperial lunacy like Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s novella of 1899 (Perera 2012, 218). The fact that the Landless twins, whose lack of home is evident from their surname, are actually English by descent and that Neville repeatedly distances himself from the “Heathens” amongst whom he formed his “ideas of civility” (Dickens 1870/2002, 73) makes no difference. Shady British activities on foreign soil will return to England “to pollute the home front” (Tromp 2013, 49), as happens in so much crime fiction of the era. Cloisterham’s irrational fear and simultaneous ignorance of everything that derives from colonial territory is rendered in a passage of typically Dickensian wit, where the narrative voice assumes the focalisation of Cloisterham’s shared consciousness. In gossiping about Neville’s past life, the rumour-mill indulges in ignorant fantasies about “nomadic persons, encamping now in Asia, now in Africa, now in the West Indies, and now at the North Pole,” all of whom are vaguely supposed in Cloisterham to be always black, always of great virtue, always calling themselves Me, and everybody else Massa or Missie (according to sex), and always reading tracts of the obscurest meaning, in broken English, but always accurately understanding them in the purest mother tongue. (Dickens 1870/2002, 183)

168  Detecting Twins It is only by resorting to racist stereotyping that a place as thoroughly out of time as Cloisterham can assume any position of superiority towards Neville, who finds himself relegated to a life in hiding and in darkness. By exploring how the mob goes after the subaltern Other’s local embodiment while at the same time, unbeknownst to the people of Cloisterham, implicating Jasper as the likely murderer of Edwin, Dickens’s novel is a lot more nuanced than many of the imperial detective stories that were to follow. In Conan Doyle and in neo-Gothic horror pastiches like D ­ racula, having the threat imported to England from ‘non-civilised’ corners of the world usually seeks to dispel fears that the savage may be lurking within.18 In actuality, though, the intrusion of atavistic throwbacks and ghost-like apparitions only serves to reveal inner monsters. Edwin Drood’s most important plot element to implicate white imperialist Britain in the colonial question is opium, “a commodity made globally available only through the workings of the imperial system, while that system depends for its viability on promoting opium consumption anywhere outside its own metropolis” (Perera 2012, 204). Not only does it associate its users with oriental otherness, but it ties up the advent of civilisation and urbanisation with an unclean economy of addiction; a constellation that will re-emerge in one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s two twin tales: The Sign of Four, a story famous for marrying off Dr. Watson to Mary Morstan, the quintessential Victorian ‘Angel in the House,’ as much as for its interrogation of the degeneracy of imperialism. The Sign of Four brackets its detection plot with Sherlock Holmes’s addiction to cocaine, which is imported from “the ill-defined periphery of empire” (Keep/Randall 1999, 210). Having repeatedly injected himself with his famous “seven-per-cent solution” under the critical gaze of Watson, the detective defends the “transcendently stimulating and clarifying” effects of the drug (Doyle 1890/2007, 2) and even takes consolation in them once Watson has abandoned him in favour of marital life. It is only ­fitting that the climax of The Sign of Four should provide another impure solution: that of the case itself, as the Indian treasure is lost “in the dark ooze at the bottom of the Thames” (ibid. 111), effectively aligning London with colonised India in an imperial geography of the ­imagination (Frank 1996, 76) and, by implication, installing the Sholto twins as f­ acilitators of this influx of the abject. The link between twins and the abject is also prefigured in Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent. It is the “muddy waters of the Sloshy” into which one of the twins is dumped as a child to grow up into foulness personified: “the scum of the earth, the mud in the streets, the slush in the gutters” (Braddon 1860/2003, 7 and 86). Jabez, who repeatedly ‘dies’ and resurrects himself to haunt his environment with ever more outrageous schemes, regularly erupts like the “swelling water” of the river, which, according to the narrator, “had a knack of dropping in at

Detecting Twins  169 odd times” like an “uninvited guest” who threatens “all domestic peace or comfort” (ibid. 204); an association further maintained when Jabez’s ­biological child is called Sloshy by his adoptive father. While Conan Doyle ties his river to the dirty secrets of imperialism, Braddon implicates hers in the crimes of industrialism: men who die in the factories of Slopperton end up in the Sloshy, whose “corpse-laden water” accommodates the guilty secrets of the factories and ensures their profitability as a trade route (Bennett 2011, 42). In these topographies of guilt and corruption, we are confronted with the characteristic nature of the abject as something that is “indeed not distinct from the subject, but rather wholly incorporated and indistinguishable from it” (McManus 2008, 16), an idea neatly summarised by the horrific image of Jabez North who, having killed a little boy, washes his hands of the victim’s blood and proceeds to drink the soiled water. Where Victorian society typically conceptualised its ideology of purification against the “abject and diseased sex organs” of the ‘dirty’ prostitute (McManus 2008, 18), its crime literature employs the image of the ghastly twin to quite similar ends. According to Julia Kristeva, the abject is associated with that which is unclean and impure, though this is not, in fact, its key defining factor. Abjection is caused rather by “what disturbs identity, system, order” and “does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 1982, 4). The twins’ evident struggle to extricate themselves from the memory of prenatal proximity as well as their environment’s difficulties in making sense of this Other aligns them very much with the nature of abjection, “a simultaneous fascination and horror” that always bears “maternal reminder[s]” (Tatum 2005, 37). The abject nature of the Other is also manifest in the subconscious of language itself. Whenever the twin is cited as an individual’s ‘number two,’ the echo of another kind of ‘number two’ is all too present – the one we teach children to use as a substitute for ‘shit,’ thereby indicating the doppelganger function of that “border of my condition as a living being” from which the body “extricates itself” (Kristeva 1982, 3). When Gilbert Adair’s incestuous twins in The Dreamers are left to stew in their own juices for too long, they quickly transform their parents’ flat into an abject hellhole: Isabelle first “shriek[s] in agony from behind the bathroom door that she would ‘soon have to shit by Caesarean section’”, only to witness her brother and Matthew “struggling to keep their bodies from turning inside-out. […] Before the eyes of the safely enthroned Théo, his flesh dissolved into a raging, uncorkable torrent of mud, sperm, vomit, egg yolk, soft caramel and silver-flecked snot” (Adair 1988/2004, 136–137). The point would not have been lost on the pioneers of psychoanalysis. In a letter to C.G. Jung, Freud shows himself fascinated by the idea that some “primitive peoples” treat the placenta like a twin (qtd. in Schwartz 1996, 83), a practice that had been reported by nineteenth-century ethnographers. Psychoanalytic theory has pondered the idea of the placenta, maybe the abject item par excellence, “as a sort of counterpart to the

170  Detecting Twins child” and the uncomfortable associations of cannibalism that permeate the animal practice of devouring it. If the twin in utero is viewed as a hostile predator, or Fressfeind, competing with the subject for nutrition, then the placenta emerges as the benign twin, “a sort of fellow-prisoner on which the foetus relied absolutely” (Gélis 1991, 165–167). This idea frequently features in twin narratives, particularly the uncanny, more horrific ones. Paul, in Michel Tournier’s Gemini (1975), wakes up in the middle of the night and feels a cold hand, believing that there must be a dead body in his bed, only to realise that it is his own, numb hand that has become alien to him and now constitutes “a fantasy of twinship” (Tournier 1975/1998, 314). The detective novel, with its numerous abject reminders of the twins’ contaminating touch, struggles immensely to separate them clearly, and whenever the failure of these efforts is admitted, the texts resort to violent orgies of gore and grand guignol – nowhere more so than in Stoker’s Dualitists, which ends with the twin brothers being completely objectified as weapons to be smashed on to one another and hacked up into a mash. When twin tales turn violent, they turn very violent.

The Barren Twin During her nonsensical yet insightful conversation with Humpty Dumpty, who tends to take things very literally, Alice observes that “one can’t help growing older”, Humpty Dumpty responds: “One can’t, perhaps,  […] but two can” (Carroll 1872/1875, 120). There is a point to the pun, which alludes to mortality as much as to the possibility of ­procreation.19 Fittingly, this poignant thought comes literally ab ovo, that is: from an egg, a worthy signifier of semblance that also propels an all-egg-ory in Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent. When the detective catches up with Jabez North, who has adopted the disguise of a French Baron, he tries to account for the man’s uncanny likeness to Jabez, whom he believes dead: “that one was dead as sure as eggs is eggs. When eggs ceases to be eggs, […] that one I found on the heath will come to life again” (Braddon 1860/2003, 264). Evidently, the shady twins that permeate the Victorian detective story are often linked to the idea of procreation and multiplication, much like their mythological ancestors who were often hailed as patron saints of fertility. They embody the cell that has split of its own volition, and a number of twin myths stress that the fertility of these unions starts as early as in the womb. Then again, twins who opt to remain caught up in the symbiotic union with their respective spitting images are considered lost causes for the marriage market and ‘traditional’ forms of reproduction. Edgar Allan Poe’s doomed Usher twins are the embodiments of this last prejudice, with Roderick as the over-sensitive artist and Madeline as the nervous, borderline hysteric woman, whose telling name (‘mad-line’)

Detecting Twins  171 indicates the impact of her psycho-pathological condition on the family line (Kinkead-Weekes 1987, 27). From Roderick’s own admission that “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature” exist between the twins follows that he embodies death-in-life as soon as his sister passes away (Poe 1839/1977, 19). The deeply incestuous union between the siblings culminates in the climactic resurrection of Madeline to bring about their symbiotic, shared downfall and to fulfil the House of Usher’s destiny: never to put forth “any enduring branch” (ibid. 8). The spectre of dynastic extinction, a firm favourite of Gothic horror, continues to haunt the late Victorian twin tale, nowhere more so than in Stoker’s The Dualitists, which levels much satire and black humour against its central couple, Ephraim and Sophonisba Bubb. The pair have trouble conceiving, having “prayed, and sighed, and groaned, and wished, and waited, and wept” in vain (Stoker 1887, 18), and the reader cannot help but add a mental note that fornication seems to be missing. Once they have managed to conceive, they accidentally participate in the killing of their beloved twin sons. Of all the novels examined in more detail here, it is The Notting Hill Mystery that has both of its twins perish in the course of the narrative, the sisters paying the price for their barrenness. Other texts suggest that the uncanny twin can be absorbed into the Empire’s system of reproduction, which makes both Poor Miss Finch and The Mystery of Edwin Drood rather prophetic texts. They not only anticipate the twentieth-century’s interest in twins as signifiers of multiplication, be it by way of cloning or other artificially aided means of reproduction, but also Galton’s invocation of the twin as a means of exploring heredity and reproduction. In his Short Notes on Heredity (1876), Galton observes a paradoxical phenomenon that had emerged from his data: on the one hand, families were more likely to produce twins if there was a history of twinship running in the family, yet on the other hand, twins themselves did not appear to be as fertile as the rest of the population. They were less likely to have children than singletons and were also less likely to marry, “however this may be accounted for” (Galton 1876a, 327). Galton does not press the consequences of this observation – unable to find a genetic reason, he shies away from the obvious conclusion, as it would point in the opposite direction: twins are not reproductively challenged, but they are less likely to enter satisfying long-term relationships with a partner, possibly because of the symbiotic bliss they can never regain. Edwin Drood highlights the fact that marriage is an economic enterprise that the state depends upon, and that the twins can only disentangle themselves from the spectre of illegitimacy and the stain of the abject by adapting to this system, thus serving “as an infusion, as it were, of new blood” into the society of Cloisterham (James 2008, 449). Before the arrival of the Landless twins, these “displaced child[ren] of the imperial system,” Edwin and Rosa’s futile engagement acknowledges their

172  Detecting Twins obligations to their late fathers and mirrors the territorial rights of the Empire (Perera 2012, 201), yet it is only through Helena and Neville that a more sensual and thus potentially carnal component is added into the mix. Dickens lays on the innuendo, particularly when it comes to Rosa, who at various stages in the novel runs with monikers like “Pussy” or “Little Rosebud,” which indicates that the society of Cloisterham depends upon fertile young women like her to partake in the system of reproduction – a satirical jab aimed at the contemporary reproductive discourse, which went so far as to proclaim that the Lord “had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it” (qtd. in Poovey 1986, 145). However, the significance of the theme of reproduction is most strongly felt in Poor Miss Finch. Before the arrival of the Dubourg twins, Lucilla shares living quarters with the new family of her father, a Rector whose ironic portrayal allows Collins to deconstruct numerous Victorian stereotypes regarding domestic bliss (see Peters 2008, xxi). The repeated description of the Rector’s second wife as “damp Mrs Finch” (Collins 1872/2008, 189) aligns her not only with what Klaus Theweleit, in his seminal work on psychosexuality, has identified as the “flowing places” that go “by the name of Woman” (1977/1987, 284), but it also hints at the permanently fluctuating number of children living in the Finch household – according to the family doctor, “there is no end to the multiplying capacity of Mrs Finch” (Collins 1872/2008, 30). The Rector has long taken to reckoning time by his wife’s pregnancies, and as a running gag in the novel, people have trouble keeping track of how many children the family has: 14 by Mrs. Finch’s own count, including “two sets of twins” (ibid. 12). The fertility theme runs through the whole novel, and it makes the Rector, rather than Nugent Dubourg, the secret antagonist of Madame Pratolungo, even though Finch remains completely inconsequential for the plot. Her closest ally is the similarly reproductively challenged Lucilla, the blind woman who seems destined for spinsterhood. This dilemma is something Collins had previously worked through in his story The Twin Sisters (1851), a cautionary tale that concludes with one of the sisters withdrawing into a life of solitude and spinsterhood. What is milked for sentimentality in The Twin Sisters is turned into biting satire in Poor Miss Finch: Rector Finch’s pompousness provokes laughter, but there is a darkly cynical undertone here, the implication being that the future of the Empire rests upon the shoulders of this vainglorious buffoon, who by the end of the novel has moved his immense family to the colonies and presides over it “pastorally as bishop” (Collins 1872/2008, 426). That reproduction was firmly linked to the political realm of nation-building and, by implication, imperialism was an idea very much of its time, and one pursued in several of Galton’s similarly minded analogies. He illustrates his idea of the ‘stirp,’ a kind of genetic nucleus carried by each individual, by resorting to political imagery and the body politic (1876b, 346), and he uses the very same imagery to

Detecting Twins  173 gloss over inconsistencies in his theory, for instance, when it comes to accounting for dissimilarities between twins. Consequently, Victorian tales of twinship and detection frequently conclude with the proclamation of a kind of enforced (re-)productivity that goes far beyond generic convention, the ensuing unabashed reproductive panic partly belying much of what went on before. How else is one to account for Lucilla’s Finch sudden adaptation to the norms of patriarchal marriage (Poor Miss Finch), for ‘Daredevil’ Dick’s spiritual renaissance (The Trail of the Serpent), or for how Dr. Watson’s flees the scene of the crime in The Sign of Four to end up in the arms of Mary Morstan – away from Holmes, away from the horrific twins, and away from his shocking encounter with the abject? Like in twin farce, the codas of these novels send the characters off to the safe haven of the marriage bed, to (re-)productive fornication in the service of a dying empire, which very much prefigures the eugenic obsession of Galton’s successors: the Nazi doctors who subjected twins to the cruellest experiments while simultaneously trying to perfect the health of the German body politic and its reproductive system. The next chapter will elaborate on how these fantasies of reproduction become manifest in dystopian science-fiction, written under the impression of Third Reich eugenics.

Notes 1 P.G. Wodehouse’s George and Alfred (1966) plays a humorous variation on this theme: a writer pretends to be his own twin to escape his imminent arrest, only for things to turn farcical when his actual twin brother, a conjuror, appears on the scene. 2 Susan K. Gillman and Robert L. Patten go so far as to suggest that Mark Twain exclusively portrays genetic twins whereas an Englishman like Charles Dickens more frequently explores doubles (1985, 441–442), a claim that can only be sustained by deliberately overlooking several texts. 3 Notable cases of actors playing dual roles as twins include Bette Davis (Dead Ringer, 1964), Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin (Big Business, 1988), Jeremy Irons (Dead Ringers, 1988), Marion Cotillard (Les Jolies Choses, 2001), Nicolas Cage (Adaptation, 2002), Christian Bale (The Prestige, 2006), and Tom Hardy (Legend, 2015). Adam Sandler’s performance in Jack and Jill (2011) presents the rare case of an actor playing fraternal twins, while David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) used two actors (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence) to play twins but digitally grafted Hammer’s face upon the other actor’s body in post-production. 4 Thorndike’s paper on the Measurement of Twins (1905) is usually credited as the first scientific study to systematically subject twins to a variety of cognitive tests in order to measure their intelligence. 5 Rather than produce a specific criminal type, Galton’s superimpositions produced rather unremarkable ‘everyman’ pictures with overtones of ghosts (Grimes 2006, 75–78). 6 Kipling’s short-story is the monological account of Durga Dass, who claims that his brother Ram has tricked him out of all his possessions, presenting himself as the honest man and his twin as “the thief and the liar” (Kipling 1888/2008, 49).

174  Detecting Twins 7 The author of The Notting Hill Mystery was unknown for a long time but has now been established as the lawyer Charles Warren Adams, who wrote the novel under the pseudonym Charles Felix. 8 Jake Kerridge (2012) claims that The Notting Hill Mystery was out of print since its initial one-volume publication in 1863, but this is not true: it was reprinted in an omnibus edition of several Victorian mystery novels in 1945 (see Richardson 1945). 9 Adams’s description of “the darkness of the stormy November night” (1865/2012, 283) seems to paraphrase the frequently maligned opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830). 10 The essence of the mesmerist cure lies in acknowledging the illness as “caused by blockage of magnetic fluid […], and to cure is to free the blockage.” The mesmerist then provokes a crisis in order to “restart the healthful process,” that is: to magnetise the solidified magnetic fluids in the patient’s body (Waterfield 2002, 71–72). 11 Conan Doyle employs the same trope in The Speckled Band, where Helen Stoner claims that she sensed the impending death of her twin sister, “and you know how subtle are the links which bind two souls which are so closely allied” (1892/1982, 182). 12 Rosa says of Jasper that he haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. […] He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. (Dickens 1870/2002, 70) 13 Twins are frequently aligned with vagabonds and gipsies in these tales. Catherine in The Notting Hill Mystery, Helena in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and the Stoner sisters in Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band are all linked to ‘gipsy’ families. 14 Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent, composed a good decade earlier, shows similar tropes coming into place, including the “silver watch” that “stopped at ten o’clock” (110), the forged suicide note (114–115), and the untraceable poison (153). 15 Dickens is said to have been mainly interested in Drood as a character study of Jasper, not as a murder mystery (see Paroissien 2002, xviii–xix). 16 Fruttero & Lucentini suggest that The Mystery of Edwin Drood hides a literary crime beneath its surface. Their book concludes with Hercule Poirot explaining that Dickens himself must have been murdered by Wilkie Collins in retaliation for plagiarism. 17 Crisparkle notes “an indefinable kind of pause coming and going” on the twins’ expression “which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch, or a bound” (Dickens 1870/2002, 58–59), and Jasper suspects there might be “something of the tiger in [Neville’s] dark blood” (81). 18 By contrast, in ‘Golden Age’ detective novels, the threat of disruption usually comes from within, and the fantasised realm of stability is not a spatial, but a temporal one. 19 Given how Victorian literature makes a point of linking the twin narrative with discourses surrounding barrenness and fertility, the episode sits well in close proximity to Alice’s encounter with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who have their own story of failed procreation to tell: that of “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” wherein the old oyster loses its young.

Detecting Twins  175

Works Cited Primary Texts Adair, Gilbert (1988/2004). The Dreamers. London: faber & faber. Adams, Charles Warren (1865/2012). The Notting Hill Mystery. London: ­British Library. Anon. (1802). The Twin Brothers; or, Virtue and Vice Contrasted. London: Hurst. Barrie, James Matthew (1904/1995). “Peter Pan or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up.” ‘Peter Pan’ and Other Plays. Ed. Peter Hollindale. Oxford/New York: OUP, 73–154. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth (1860/2003). The Trail of the Serpent. New York: Modern Library. Carroll, Lewis (1872/1875). Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. New York: Macmillan. Christie, Agatha (1923/1994). The Murder on the Links. London: Harper Collins. Christie, Agatha (1929/2015). “The Unbreakable Alibi.” Partners in Crime. London: Harper Collins, 198–220. Collins, Wilkie (1851/1995). “The Twin Sisters.” The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Julian Thompson. London: Robinson, 7–20. Collins, Wilkie (1872/2008). Poor Miss Finch. Oxford: OUP. Derrick, Joseph (1884/1910). Twins. New York: Samuel French. Dickens, Charles (1839/1991). The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Oxford: OUP. Dickens, Charles (1850/1997). “Detective Police.” Selected Journalism, 1850– 1870. Ed. David Pascoe. London: Penguin, 246–262. Dickens, Charles (1857/1991). Little Dorrit. Oxford: OUP. Dickens, Charles (1870/2002). The Mystery of Edwin Drood. London: Penguin. Doyle, Arthur Conan (1890/2007). The Sign of Four. London: Penguin. Doyle, Arthur Conan (1892/1982). The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. New York: Berkley. Doyle, Arthur Conan (1902/2003). The Hound of the Baskervilles. London: Penguin. Fruttero, Carlo, and Franco Lucentini (1989/1992). The D. Case: The Truth about ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’. Trans. Gregory Dowling. New York: Harcourt. Grand, Sarah (1893/1992). The Heavenly Twins. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Greene, Graham (1939/2005). “The Case for the Defence.” Complete Short Stories. London: Penguin, 67–70. Horowitz, Anthony (2015). Moriarty. New York: Harper. Kipling, Rudyard (1888/2008). “Gemini.” ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ and Other Stories. Ed. Louis L. Cornell. Oxford: OUP, 49–57. Link, Kelly (1998/2001). “The Specialist’s Hat.” Stranger Things Happen. Northampton: Small Beer, 55–70. Mackay, Charles (1887). The Twin Soul or, the Strange Experiences of Mr. Rameses: A Psychological and Realistic Romance in Two Volumes. London: Ward and Downey. McEwan, Ian (2001). Atonement. London: Vintage. Milne, Alan Alexander (1922/2015). The Red House Mystery. Tustin: Xist.

176  Detecting Twins Niffenegger, Audrey (2009). Her Fearful Symmetry. New York: Scribner. Poe, Edgar Allan (1839/1977). “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Tales of ­Mystery and Imagination. London: Pan Books, 7–25. Queen, Ellery (1933/2014). The Siamese Twin Mystery. Cologne: Bastei. Ebook. Robertson, Thomas William (1866/1980) “Ours.” Six Plays. Ashover: Amber Lane, 57–116. Sayers, Dorothy L. (1933/1969). “The Image in the Mirror.” Hangman’s ­Holiday. New York: Avon, 9–34. Setterfield, Diane (2006). The Thirteenth Tale. New York: Washington Square. Shaffer, Anthony (1970/1981). Sleuth. London/Boston: Marion Boyars. Stoker, Bram (1887). “The Dualitists; or, the Death Doom of the Double Born.” The Theatre Annual 5: 18–29. Stoppard, Tom (1988). Hapgood. New York: Samuel French. Tournier, Michel (1975/1998). Gemini. Trans. Anne Carter. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP. Twain, Mark (1894/2005). ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’ and ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’. Ed. Sidney E. Berger. New York/London: Norton. Vickers, Roy (1953/2012). “Double Image.” ‘Double Image’ and Other Stories. Basingstoke: Bello, 1–38. Wodehouse, P.G. (1966). “George and Alfred.” Plum Pie. London: Herbert ­Jenkins, 163–178.

Other Media A Simple Favor (2018). Dir. Paul Feig. Lionsgate. Columbo: Double Shock (1973). Dir. Robert Butler. Universal. Die blaue Hand (1967). Dir. Alfred Vohrer. Rialto. Sherlock: The Abominable Bride (2013). Dir. Douglas Mackinnon. BBC One. Stuck on You (2003). Dir. Peter & Bobby Farrelly. Fox. The Dark Mirror (1946). Dir. Robert Siodmak. Universal. The Playhouse (1921). Dir. Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline. First National. Us (2019). Dir. Jordan Peele. Universal.

Secondary Texts Allan, Janice M. (2013). “The Contemporary Response to Sensation Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. Andrew Mangham. Cambridge: CUP, 85–98. Auerbach, Nina (1981). “Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian Freud.” Critical Inquiry 8.2: 281–300. Basham, Diana (1992). The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Baudrillard, Jean (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Bennett, Mark (2011). “Generic Gothic and Unsettling Genre: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Penny Blood.” Gothic Studies 13.1: 38–54. Bersani, Ferdinando (2011). “Mesmerism: From an Ambiguous Physical and Medical Canon to Psychology.” The Case and the Canon: Anomalies, Discontinuities, Metaphors between Science and Literature. Eds. Alessandra Calanchi et al. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 59–72. Brantlinger, Patrick (1990). Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP.

Detecting Twins  177 Bratton, Jacky (2004). “The Music Hall.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. Ed. Kerry Powell. Cambridge: CUP, 164–182. Caillois, Roger (1941/1983). “The Detective Novel as Game.” Trans. William W. Stowe. The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt, 1–12. Casey, Ellen Miller (2006). “‘Highly Flavoured Dishes’ and ‘Highly Seasoned Garbage’: Sensation in the Athenaeum.” Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Eds. Kimberley Harrison and Richard Fantina. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 3–12. Coates, Paul (1988). The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction. Houndmills: Macmillan. Cohn, Elisha (2015). “Suspending Detection: Collins, Dickens, and the Will to Know.” Dickens Studies Annual 46: 253–276. Cooke, Simon (2014). “Visualizing the Sensational: George du Maurier’s ­I llustrations for The Notting Hill Mystery in Once a Week.” Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/dumaurier/cooke.html. Dawson, Gowan (2010). “Science and Its Popularization.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914. Ed. Joanne Shattock. Cambridge: CUP, 165–183. Deleuze, Gilles (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Charles Stivale and Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP. Deleuze, Gilles (2004). “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” ‘Desert Islands’ and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Michael Taomina. Paris: Semiotext(e), 81–85. Dettmering, Peter (2006). Zwillings- und Doppelgängerphantasie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Ewbank, Inga-Stina (1996). “Scandinavia, 1849–1912.” Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre, 1850–1918. Ed. Claude Schumacher. Cambridge: CUP, 261–321. Faulkner, David (1994). “The Confidence Man: Empire and the Deconstruction of Muscular Christianity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Ed. Donald E. Hall. Cambridge: CUP, 175–193. Flint, Kate (2012). “Sensation.” The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature. Ed. Kate Flint. Cambridge: CUP, 220–242. Forderer, Christof (1999). Ich-Eklipsen: Doppelgänger in der Literatur seit 1800. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. Foucault, Michel (1975/1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Frank, Lawrence (1996). “Dreaming the Medusa: Imperialism, Primitivism, and Sexuality in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four.” Signs 22.1: 52–85. Galton, Francis (1875). “The History of Twins, as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture.” Fraser’s Magazine Nov.: 566–576. Galton, Francis (1876a). “Short Notes on Heredity, &c., in Twins.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 5: 324–329. Galton, Francis (1876b). “A Theory of Heredity.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 5: 329–348. Galton, Francis (1883/1907). Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London/New York: Dent. Galton, Francis (1892). Finger Prints. London/New York: Macmillan.

178  Detecting Twins Gélis, Jacques (1991). History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe. Trans. Rosemary Morris. Cambridge: Polity. Gillman, Susan K., and Robert L. Patten (1985). “Dickens: Doubles: Twain: Twins.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39.4: 441–458. Grimes, Hilary (2006). Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny and Scenes of Writing. Univ. Diss., University of Glasgow. James, Simon J. (2008). “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” A Companion to Charles Dickens. Ed. David Paroissien. Malden: Blackwell, 444–451. Keep, Christopher, and Don Randall (1999). “Addiction, Empire, and Narrative in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sign of Four.” Novel 1: 207–221. Kerridge, Jake (2012). “The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix: Review.” The Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9131411/ The-Notting-Hill-Mystery-by-Charles-Felix-review.html. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1987). “Reflections on, and in, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order. Ed. A. Robert Lee. London/Totowa: Vision, 17–34. Knight, Stephen T. (2004). Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, ­Diversity. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knox, Ronald A. (1928/1946). “A Detective Story Decalogue.” The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 194–196. Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. LaCoss, Don (2007). “Our Lady of Darkness: Decadent Arts & the Magnetic Sleep of Madeleine G.” Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920. Ed. Anne Stiles. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 52–73. Lash, John (1993). Twins and the Double. London: Thames & Hudson. Martin, Nicholas G. (2012). “Discussion of ‘The History of Twins, as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture’ by Francis Galton (1875).” International Journal of Epidemiology 41.4: 917–919. McKnight, Natalie (2013). “‘A Little Humoring of Pussy’s Points!’; or, Sex – the ‘Real’ Unsolved Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Dickens Quarterly 30.1: 55–63. McManus, Nicole Ann (2008). “Purging the Self: Entering the Abject in Victorian Texts of Vaginal Exploration.” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 13.1: 2–20. Nayder, Lillian (2002). “Victorian Detective Fiction.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Eds. William Baker and Kenneth Womack. Westport/London: Greenwood, 177–187. Nayder, Lillian (2003). “‘Blue Like Me’: Collins, Poor Miss Finch, and the Construction of Racial Identity.” Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Eds. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 266–282. Palmer, Brian (2011). “Double Inanity: Twin Studies Are Pretty Much Useless.” Slate, www.slate.com/articles/life/twins/2011/08/double_inanity.html. Paroissien, David (2002). “Introduction” and “Notes”. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By Charles Dickens. London: Penguin, xiii–xxxvi and 321–381.

Detecting Twins  179 Perera, Suvendrini (2012). “‘All the Girls Say Serve Him Right’: The Multiple Anxieties of Edwin Drood.” A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens: Dickens, Sexuality and Gender. Ed. Lillian Nayder. Farnham: Ashgate, 199–222. Peters, Catherine (2008). “Introduction.” Poor Miss Finch. By Wilkie Collins. Oxford: OUP, vii–xxiii. Poovey, Mary (1986). “‘Scenes of an Indelicate Character’: The Medical ‘Treatment’ of Victorian Women.” Representations 14.1: 137–168. Powell, Kersti Tarien (2014). “‘Dualism Is the Word’: Wave/Particle Functions in Banville and Stoppard.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56.3: 326–347. Poznar, Susan (2008). “Whose Body? The ‘Willing’ or ‘Unwilling’ Mesmerized Woman in Late Victorian Fiction.” Women’s Writing 15.3: 412–435. Pykett, Lyn (1994). The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’. Plymouth: Northcote House. Richardson, Maurice (1945). “Introduction.” Novels of Mystery from the Victorian Age. London: Pilot, vii–xvi. Salvant, Shawn (2012). “Mark Twain and the Nature of Twins.” NineteenthCentury Literature 67.3: 366–396. Scaggs, John (2005). Crime Fiction. London/New York: Routledge. Schwanebeck, Wieland (forthcoming). “Twinship and Tactile Anxieties in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872).” Victorian Surfaces. Eds. Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser. Schwartz, Hillel (1996). The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books. Symons, Julian (1992). Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Mysterious. Tatum, Karen E. (2005). Explaining the Depiction of Violence against Women in Victorian Literature. Lewiston: Mellen. Theweleit, Klaus (1977/1987). Male Fantasies. Vol. 1. Trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner. Cambridge: Polity. Thorndike, Edward L. (1905). “Measurement of Twins.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 2.20: 547–553. Tromp, Marlene (2013). “The Pollution of the East: Economic Contamination and Xenophobia in Little Dorrit and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia. Eds. Marlene Tromp, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 27–55. Van Dine, S.S. (1928/1946). “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 189–193. Verschuer, Otmar Frhr. von (1939). “Twin Research from the Time of Francis Galton to the Present-Day.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 128.850: 62–81. Waller, John C. (2012). “The Birth of the Twin Study: A Commentary on Francis Galton’s ‘The History of Twins’.” International Journal of Epidemiology 41.4: 913–917. Waterfield, Robin (2002). Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis. Houndmills/ Oxford: Macmillan.

180  Detecting Twins Watson, Peter (1982). Twins: An Uncanny Relationship? New York: Viking. Williams, Carolyn (2012). “Melodrama.” The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature. Ed. Kate Flint. Cambridge: CUP, 193–219. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia (2005). “Der medizinische Diskurs in der viktorianischen Literatur.” Kulturgeschichte der englischen Literatur. Ed. Vera Nünning. Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 182–195.

6 Multiplying Twins

The Prestige: When the Twin Met the Clone Media coverage of the scientific operation of cloning is big on metaphors, suggesting that cloning is a form of sorcery or ‘dark magic,’ so it is probably quite fitting that one of the most well-known literary texts to bring together cloning and twinship should revolve around magicians. Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige (1995) is a neo-Victorian mash-up of nineteenth-century discourses about magic, psychology, and science, which draws upon various double tropes. Since its original publication, Priest’s book has been somewhat eclipsed by Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation (2006), which has invited meta-cinematic readings about Hollywood’s dream factory and the filmic production of illusions, like other films about con men and magicians (see Olson 2015). Yet Priest’s source text is no less layered when it comes to interrogating the twinned nature of producing fiction. It is telling that both iterations of what is essentially the same story material rely on totally different structures. Priest’s novel makes use of a present-day frame narrative which involves the descendants of both magicians, one of whom is suffering from ‘vanishing twin’ syndrome, and arranges the diaries of its two protagonists one after the other, so that the reader goes over the same timeline twice but from two different perspectives. Nolan’s film, by contrast, cuts back and forth between the perspectives of the two magicians and builds towards a final-act dénouement typical of the new millennium’s ‘mindfuck’ cinema. The two magicians who battle it out in The Prestige represent contrasting approaches to their craft: the skilled ‘sleight of hand’ artists who dominated the field throughout the nineteenth century as opposed to the virtuoso conjurors who rely on technical gadgets and elaborate ­machinery to achieve the desired effects (Heilmann/Llewellyn 2010, 178). Alfred Borden, one of the two (though exact numbers can be quite deceptive, as the novel gradually reveals), is thoroughly infatuated with the minutiae of crafting ‘honest’ illusions and respects the necessity for secrecy surrounding his profession. Rupert Angier, by contrast, represents a more business-minded, less idealistic approach to stage wizardry, and

182  Multiplying Twins he does not shy away from producing mechanical copies of himself, as would befit a man so intent on building a franchise and becoming rich. After Borden has accidentally caused Angier’s wife to miscarry, their rivalry acquires a personal dimension, and they frequently endanger each other’s lives. Soon, the feud revolves mainly around their attempts to outdo each other with competing versions of ‘The (New) Transported Man,’ a trick that sees the performer enter a portal, only to re-appear instantly elsewhere on stage. Angier, unable to figure out how Borden pulls off his signature stunt – he remains deaf to any claim that Borden’s trick must involve a twin – asks the inventor Nikola Tesla to build him an apparatus to transport matter from one place to another. This results in the paradoxical constellation of him having to keep his trick a secret for the simple reason that there is no trick, at least not in the traditional sense: “What the audience sees is actually what has happened! But I cannot allow this ever to be known, for science has in this case replaced magic” (Priest 1995/2011, 282). Borden, by contrast, is gradually revealed to have a twin brother with whom he shares his existence, demonstrating a dedication to the craft that goes beyond Angier’s comprehension. Pondering the extent of their disguise and their habitual bed-tricks, Angier asks himself how “concealment and deception” could extend to “the conjugal bed,” and he shakes his head at the sheer fact that the Bordens have subsumed everything “into one collective experience” to fool the audience (297), effectively “halving” their lives: “While one lives in the world, the other hides in a nether world, literally non-existent, a lurking spirit, a doppelganger, a prestige” (318–319). By disclosing the existence of the Borden twin in a climactic narrative twist, Nolan’s adaptation proudly and rather unapologetically reveals itself as a throwback to the melodramatic antics of the rather hackneyed whodunits that critics had so fervently attacked during the Golden Age of detective fiction, as was discussed in Chapter 5. Nolan’s version of The Prestige thus opts for an “evasive, displaced and inconclusive” mise-en-scène (Tembo 2015, 204) and constantly keeps Borden’s twin on the fringes or half-obscured from view to make the climax all the more effective (Fig. 6.1). Clearly, The Prestige’s epic, no-expenses-spared film adaptation does not shy away from using tried and tested effects. As a result, the film tends to draw most of the attention these days, with the prominent auteur signature of Nolan now eclipsing that of Priest himself. But what could be more fitting to the story of a celebrated illusionist who appropriates another illusionist’s famous routine and updates it with state-ofthe-art technology?1 The filmmaker has justly been read as the legitimate heir of the Victorian stage conjuror; both are judged “by [their] ability to deceive and mystify us” and by their “power to dazzle and captivate” (Heilmann/Llewellyn 2010, 175). However, it would be unfair to dismiss Priest’s elaborately constructed novel altogether, not least because

Multiplying Twins  183

Fig. 6.1  Borden’s twin is obscured from view (The Prestige).

it never subscribes to the presumptuous idea that it can compete with the visual absoluteness of the baffling moment when the magician, that is, the filmmaker, produces the white rabbit (or the secret twin brother) out of his hat. Priest’s novel encourages the reader early on to guess that Borden is, in fact, two men: “Anyone who reads this narrative”, writes ­Borden, “will probably work it out for themselves. What cannot be guessed is the effect the secret has had on my life” (Priest 1995/2011, 67). Like the truly skilful magician that he is, Borden-the-narrator is upfront with his readers and holds back at the same time, admitting to double-play right from the beginning as he outlines “the deception that is my life […]. Just as it is when I show my hands to be empty I have omitted the significant information, and now you are looking in the wrong place” (34). He intersperses his account with small clues to indicate his dual existence, and the readers are only likely to grasp the full implications of these once they re-read the novel.2 Borden’s emphatic insistence that “this is the only copy” (31) counts to that effect, as do his somewhat tautological iteration of “[m]y name, my real name” (31), his brief mentioning of siblings whom he claims to have grown up “in reasonable harmony with” (38) and of significant “parallel developments” that occurred in his formative years (41). When Borden starts an affair with his assistant, Olive, and talks about his life consisting of “two distinct halves” (85), the reader is encouraged to interpret this as the customary schizophrenia of the habitual adulterer, but the diary soon reveals a much more bizarre and Janus-faced texture: Whom did Sarah marry? Was it me, or was it me? I have two children, whom I adore. But are they mine to adore, really mine alone …

184  Multiplying Twins or are they actually mine? […] [W]ith which of me did Olive fall in love, and with whom did she move into the flat in Hornsey? (115) Soon, the narrative is brimming with split-personality effects and the increasingly bizarre implications of what Borden calls ‘The Pact,’ as a second narrative voice inserts itself and begins a dialogue with the first Borden, challenging his claim for authority. The second voice remains simultaneously disembodied and fleshly, and it will continue to haunt the pages of the diary, voicing agreement or disagreement with Borden’s account in an often highly paradoxical fashion: “I have read it through several times, & I think I understand what I am driving at”, and, in the same entry, the narrative voice ponders whether to recount an event now or “[to] leave a note for me to find” (45). Tellingly, the only visible feature that allows the reader to distinguish between both Bordens is one brother’s consequent use of the ampersand (&) instead of the full transcription of ‘and.’ The typographic sign indicates the connective tissue between the twins, as exemplified by its syntactic function – to add and to supplement3 – while its visual design reminds us of the snake attempting to swallow its own tail (Fig. 6.2), the Ouroboros with which Charlie Kaufman’s screenwriter-twin identifies in Adaptation (2002) and to which I shall return in the final chapter. The ampersand rounds off the connection between the twins without invoking the harsh caesura of the comma, and other twin narratives abandon punctuation altogether in order to adjust to the twinned synthesis. If the spirituality of twinship dictates that we buy into the frequently articulated fiction of two people being in perfect sync, from first to last breath, then the comma, as a grammatically dictated breather, can be read as a device of forceful separation that must be anathema to twinship. No wonder twinship has a tendency for doubling up on the comma to turn it into twinship’s trusted ally, the quotation mark. While the diaristic arrangement of The Prestige is too fragmented to pronounce a definite statement on how the two Bordens differ in

Fig. 6.2  T  he Ouroboros (Anon 2012) and its typographic descendant.

Multiplying Twins  185 character, the ‘ampersand’ twin appears to be the more transgressive, wicked one of the two, with some strong overtones of ‘evil twinship.’ It is he who diverts from the ‘official’ truth regarding Borden’s affair with Olive, which suggests that he is the driving force behind it and the one who leads a bohemian existence in the magician’s workshop, while his brother gets to enjoy the fruits of marriage and domestic life. By the same token, the fact that some of Borden’s more illicit doings are missing from their shared diary suggests the twins are not as much in sync as they would have their reader believe. However, any certainty in that respect is bound to be muddled by their shared determination to “assume responsibility” for anything the other one says or does (50) and by the paradoxical and farcical implications that result from this arrangement: “I can say that it was I who remained in the workshop while I returned to the flat” (88). In spite of this extended riff on the dual self, however, it is Angier’s narrative that propels the novel into the twentieth century, in that it leads the way from old-fashioned twin trickery towards dystopian fantasies of cloning and multiplication. Angier’s encounter with Tesla aligns the illusionist with the scientist by way of their shared utopianism and stage wizardry; both are rather ambiguously hailed and subverted as harbingers of the world to come and as magnificent showmen (Ramos 2013, 115). Once Angier has seen sparks fly during one of Tesla’s public displays of electric voltage, he regards him as a brother in spirit who delivers a good show with outstanding visual effects. Between them, they encompass most of the (pseudo-)sciences of the Victorian era: mesmerism, conjuring, and telepathy.4 At the same time, Angier’s narrative discourse produces twin effects similar to those of Borden when a ‘prestige ghost,’ “a thin, insubstantial copy of myself”, splits from Angier’s body during an interrupted performance of his act (Priest 1995/2011, 302). The resultant being, a literal ‘ghost from the machine,’ shares Angier’s consciousness and memory and haunts him like a Gothic double, similar to Frankenstein’s monster. The ghost eventually seizes control over the narrative once Angier, weakened from having performed the exhaustive routine, has passed away. Even in the reporting of his own death, Angier 2.0 must acknowledge that he is doomed to follow in Borden’s footsteps: “I who write this am not the same as the I who died” (325). Unlike Borden, though, Angier is responsible for having brought his own double into the world. What Tesla builds for him is eventually revealed to be not a transporting device but something akin to a Victorianera 3D printer that produces living and breathing copies of its owner, while the ‘original’ perishes in the process. In his diary, Angier only briefly alludes to the fact that his performance produces “prestige m ­ aterials” which must be disposed of (286), and it is up to Borden’s present-day descendant (and, in the closing shot of Nolan’s film, the omniscient camera-eye) to bear witness to the full horror of what this means, as he

186  Multiplying Twins stumbles upon the secret cavern where Angier has stored the bodies of all the uncanny doppelgangers produced during his nightly performances: Human bodies lay uncovered on every shelf of the racks. Each one was male, and fully clothed. […] Each body was identical to all the others. The man had a pale face, an aquiline nose and a thin moustache. His lips were pale. He had a narrow brow and receding hair which was brilliantined back. […] There was no sign of decay in any of the corpses. It was if each one had been frozen in life, made inert without being made dead. (Priest 1995/2011, 353–354) Few commentators were able to resist the impulse to read this passage, once it had been adapted for the big screen, as yet another meta-­cinematic emblem of how film produces ‘dead images,’ but in the context of the novel, the paragraph rather suggests that Angier, the self-appointed visionary who carries strong overtones of the ‘mad scientist,’ heralds scientific innovation and the dawn of the new century – not in spite of, but because of the countless atrocities he commits. He conveniently buries them in his cellar, which provides plenty of storage space and serves as the magician’s subconscious. Each shelf is labelled with the exact date and location of the respective performance, which makes the cavern resemble a neatly organised graveyard of adult stillbirths, and Angier’s meticulousness prefigures the inhuman bureaucracy of the Third Reich, not to mention the horrific twin experiments that occurred in the death camps.

The Age of the Simulacrum In Priest’s retrospective science-fiction dystopia, the chamber of horrors of The Prestige’s final chapter acts as a portal into the twentieth century and takes a shortcut into the postmodern age of the simulacrum. Angier’s machine-produced doppelgangers look ahead to the age of cloning and supplant Borden’s traditional model of duality: in the modern age, DNA emerges as “the ultimate Twin” (Lash 1993, 31), even though the twin and the clone occupy quite different ideological positions. While clones are often and somewhat misleadingly labelled as ‘synthetic’ twins, identical twins are singled out as “Nature’s clones” (Black 2004, 348).5 Jacques Derrida, when asked about the cloning debate, rejects the idea that ­“cloning began with cloning”, though his argument is less on the side of technology and has more to do with the reproductive gestures which are the very precondition of discourse to begin with: “As if there weren’t cloning and then more cloning! As if there weren’t a clonelike way of reproducing the discourse against cloning. Wherever there is repetition and duplication, even resemblance, there is cloning” (Derrida/Roudinesco 2004, 38).

Multiplying Twins  187 The novel’s sole survivor, the literal ‘ghost from the machine,’ is quite incapable of saying with any certainty what is real anymore, underlining the Derridean logic behind Tesla’s machine; the double produced by the apparatus is “the sign of its own supplementation: it both is and is not the self” (Tembo 2015, 210). Where the existence of ‘Alfred Borden’ erodes any attempt to distinguish between the two twins, Angier’s prestige steps up to the role of the ‘Phantom of the Opera’ who has been driven mad not only by the impossible task of coming to terms with its deeds (after all, what is Angier really guilty of – murder? suicide? infanticide?), but also by what Jean Baudrillard characterises as the “ludic universe” of “possible simulation[s]” (1990, 157). The set-up of Angier’s signature trick logically dictates that the performer must die each night and that the copy will continue his existence, which suggests that the ‘original’ Angier has long passed away. This makes the novel resonate with Baudrillard’s third-order simulation where “the copy becomes the real thing: in Angier’s performance as much as in neo-Victorianism” (Heilmann/Llewellyn 2010, 184). Cloning is, by Baudrillard’s own account, the logical apex of the age of simulacrum, the “[d]elirious apotheosis of a productive technology” and, as evidenced by the climactic arrangement of The Prestige, “the last stage of the history and modeling of the body,” in that it subjects the individual “to serial propagation” (Baudrillard 1981, 97, 99). While the novel does not directly implicate the digital age in its present-day frame narrative, it already dreams the digital dream of copying without ‘generation loss,’ that is: without the perceptible loss in quality that always occurs in analogue systems, as copies are made of copies. Moreover, it sets up Angier and Borden, the two rival performers, as the kind of monstrous narcissists whom Baudrillard has in mind when he talks about the multiplying selves of the digital age, a form of bionic mirroring that goes “from the Same to the Same without going through the Other.” By virtue of infinitely repeating our biological ‘essence,’ DNA provides a mere “narcissistic extension” of the self, but one that, crucially, affords no distance at all (Baudrillard 1990, 167–168). As Priest’s Rupert Angier would confirm, it is, paradoxically, the multiplication of the self that leads to the latter’s complete extinction, as “[m]ultiplication is positive only in our system of accumulation”, whereas [i]n the symbolic order, it is equivalent to subtraction. […] [I]f an individual dies, his death is a considerable event, whereas if a thousand individuals die, the death of each is a thousand times less important. Each of two twins, because he has a double, is ultimately just half an individual – if you clone him to infinity, his value becomes equal to zero. (Baudrillard 1997/2002, 199)

188  Multiplying Twins Baudrillard’s crude dismissal of twinship as a somewhat diminished form of individuality rests on a conflation of theoretical categories, particularly of Deleuze’s differentiation between copies and simulacra. While scientific attempts at cloning seek to create copies, that is: “well-founded pretenders” and “secondary possessors” of pre-existing DNA, Baudrillard really attacks what Deleuze calls simulacra: the “false pretenders” that permeate dystopian fictions of identity theft (Deleuze 1990, 256). In his attempt to reverse Platonism, which tends to keep the simulacra “completely submerged” in order to “distinguish the pure from the impure, [and] the authentic from the inauthentic,” Deleuze seeks to help the simulacra “affirm their rights among icons and copies” and to refute the whole Platonic hierarchy (ibid. 254–262). Even if Deleuze’s account, like Derrida’s, sounds more optimistic than Baudrillard’s contributions to the debate, cloning can never be free of ambiguities. It may produce “the perfect twin” (Baudrillard 1981, 95), but as part of the quintessential proleptic discourse, forever directed into our future as a species, cloning lends itself as much to utopia as to dystopia. Baudrillard’s rhetoric only runs with the latter and utilises a rather melodramatic denunciation of cloning as a thoroughly anti-humanist project,6 without being quite consistent on the topic. Occasionally, he grants twins some degree of auratic quality that clones are, in his opinion, lacking. He suggests that while twins “enshrine the particular, and sacrosanct, fascination of the Two – of that which has been two from the start, and has never been One”, cloning enshrines nothing except for “the reiteration of the same: 1 + 1 + 1 +1, etc.” (Baudrillard 1993, 116). In spite of this alleged rift, clones arguably have more in common with twins than with the double trope. Where the double is usually tied up with late nineteenth-century ideas about the id running amok inside what it still very much “a single self” (Wasson 2011, 74), cloning amounts to a literalisation or materialisation of the double trope (Baudrillard 1993, 116) and thus has more in common with twinship. Clones may neither share all of their genes nor the environment they inhabit, but the fact that they result from a duplication of donor cells has led to them being labelled as “identical twins removed in time” (Stolcke 2012, 34). They are fashioned from the same genetic material, though usually not carried by the same female. By the same token, geneticists have pointed at the existence of twins in order to argue for the legitimacy of their work and to refute criticism, particularly the allegation that they are violating the laws of nature. John Harris, for one, argues that twins are “clones [that] have always been with us” (2004, 3), while Martha Kuhlman resorts to the twin metaphor in order to characterise the relationship between the clone and the ‘original’ for lack of a better terminology (2004, 79). Others have followed their lead, maybe in the hope that the twin, as “the benign image of the clone,” might “assuage long-term fears of cloning posing a threat to human individuality” (Haran et al. 2008, 36).

Multiplying Twins  189 This optimism may be all well and good, but as the previous chapters have made clear, even the most comic iteration of twinship always carries an edge of ambiguity and is thus never completely free of troubling subtexts. Moreover, it may be historically accurate to describe the clone as the logical successor of the double trope (Schwab 2012, 81), but this must go together with a consideration of the ensuing media transfer. The considerable amount of scholarship surrounding clones on screen is testament to this, as is the way in which films have been instrumental in establishing the visual tropes, clichéd as they often may be, of cloning discourse, for instance, by employing images of twinship (O’Riordan 2008, 110).7 The absorption of Priest’s Prestige novel by Nolan’s film adaptation is a case in point, for it is rather indicative of the nexus between genomics and film: both are related to techno sciences of reproduction (O’Riordan 2008, 105). Cloning is thus tied up with the (post-)modern media environment, where the rather “pedestrian” activity of copying that is so fundamental to the constitution of our bodies and identities has turned into a proper cultural obsession (Schwartz 1996, 211). This chapter is, of course, not exclusively about audiovisual treatments of the topic, but the multitude of cinematic cloning scenarios certainly deserves to be considered in this context. Long before it became feasible in science, cloning had been weighing heavily on the literary imagination. The latter has been instrumental in shaping cloning discourse at least since the early twentieth century – not only by working through dystopian scenarios about mad scientists and their dubious ethics, but also by providing metaphors and cognitive scripts that continue to frame and structure the way we talk and think about cloning (see Nerlich/Clarke/ Dingwall 2001). A similar phenomenon can be observed throughout the history of twinship, for the epistemological power struggles that occur in the field of medicine are negotiated via literature. Nazi eugenicists used to draw heavily on fiction and mythology in order to argue for the genetic determinism evidenced by the phenomenon of twinship. One of the twentieth century’s most widely publicised media stories on cloning, the so-called Rorvik hoax of 1978, which happened to coincide with the release of Franklin J. Schaffner’s adaptation of The Boys from Brazil as well as with the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first IVF baby, began life as a faux non-fiction account authored by a journalist who claimed that he had helped a millionaire clone himself. The dominant literary approach to cloning is steeped in horror and dystopia, much to the dismay of scientists who argue that literature somewhat unfairly tends to focus not so much on cloning itself as on “the prospect of cloning gone wrong” (Schwartz 1996, 351). The first successfully cloned animal may have been a sheep, the epitome of harmlessness, but fiction still prefers to take the shortcut towards enforced organ donation and cloned Hitlers. New forays into the theme continue to merge “Frankenstein’s monster […] with the assembly lines of Brave

190  Multiplying Twins New World” (Nerlich/Clarke/Dingwall 2001, 40), and the plots typically revolve around evil doppelgangers, the limits of human agency, and organ-harvesting. Scientists typically find themselves cast in the roles of mad Faustian doctors who produce “Frankensteinian reanimated corpse-type freak[s] of nature” (O’Riordan 2008, 116). Maybe Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted denigration of the copy in the age of modernity preys heavily on our minds here, as clones have been reliably conceptualised as “mass-produced […] obedient, subhuman slaves” (Wasson 2011, 78). Baudrillard harks back to Benjamin when he directly implicates cloning in an unprecedented loss of aura, resorting once more to drastic imagery: not only does he suggest that the idea of the original must be abandoned altogether in the era of cloning, it is also here, after the mechanical age, that we reach “the point of no return in simulation” and that “the individual is now nothing but a cancerous metastasis of his basic formula” (1993, 119). With clones cast in the role of the “false idol” that “must be rejected” (Marks 2010, 343), literature only conjures them in order to exorcise and repel them all the more forcefully. The cloning narrative thus resembles the kind of ‘laboratory fiction’ we have come to know from classic twin tales, both in terms of its didactic agenda and its subliminal womb envy.8 This brings us all the way back to the Renaissance midwife manual and male forays into the birth chamber, as cloning continues to be conceptualised as a patriarchal project that establishes the father “as the sole parent in creation” (Jane Murphy qtd. in Ferreira 2005, 196). This tradition persists in everything from mythological texts about asexual reproduction to dystopian science-fiction, no matter what medium produces it. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), released at a time when artificial twinning of human embryos was widely discussed in the media (Nerlich/Clarke/Dingwall 2001, 42), offers a darkly satirical and highly meta-cinematic contribution to the topic worth considering here. The franchise had a significant impact on media representations of cloning, while at the same time highlighting the close affiliation between twins and clones. Not only is Jurassic Park a franchise-building horror film about a franchise in which the attractions devour the paying customers, it is also a fictionalised account of genetics which is, itself, a genetic performance that has spawned tons of merchandise and sequels (O’­R iordan 2008, 107–108). One of them, Jurassic World (2015), is both a continuation of the story and a remake, at the same time as being a cautionary tale in the spirit of the midwife manuals, which manages to have its patriarchal cake and eat it, simultaneously asserting male authority over that of women and putting the blame on the latter when the dino droppings hit the proverbial fan. Fittingly, the film’s horrific dinosaur hybrid not only mirrors the ‘monstrous’ female protagonist of the film,9 the Indominus Rex is also a twin who, as an infant, ate her own sibling. This makes Jurassic World the ultimate twin/clone bogeyman story and

Multiplying Twins  191 an even more appropriate one than Spielberg’s original film – after all, identical twins may well be “predisposed to sequels” (David Lebedoff qtd. in Cohen 2002, 45), and they have acted as reliable staples of dystopian regimes of identicalness and sameness ever since Aldous Huxley sent the Bokanovsky twins off the conveyor belt in his ground-breaking anti-Fordist parable, Brave New World (1932).

Brave New World: “Swarming Indistinguishable Sameness” Brave New World is in many respects the definitive dystopian novel of the twentieth century, for it tackles themes as diverse as genetic engineering, population control, identity politics, “the separation of sex from reproduction,” and “the institution of laws for the production and regulation of clones and cloning in a totalitarian society” (Crew 2004, 204). Huxley’s contribution to the eugenic debate did not end with Brave New World, nor did he remain the only member of the family to get caught up in it: his brother Julian found himself entangled in a post-war debate with the Protestant eugenic circle of which Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, the doyen of twin studies in the Third Reich, was the most prominent member (Weiss 2010, 756–757). In the 1930s, the themes of Brave New World resonated deeply with fascist ideology, as well as with Communism’s alleged fervour to produce identicals. Around the time of its publication, Nabokov was working on the first draft of his doppelganger tale Despair (1965), in which the narrator muses that Communism will one day “create a beautifully square world of identical brawny fellows” (30). Brave New World opens with a quasi-documentary chapter that sees visitors go on a guided tour of the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre,” where 300 “fertilisers” are immersed in their work inside a sterile laboratory (Huxley 1932/1994, 1). In Huxley’s futuristic London, procreation has long been managed via a sterile lab routine of absolute biological determinism (Peller 2008, 67), the future of the species and population control being subject to complete predictability. In order to facilitate the reproductive equivalent of the state’s motto, “Community, Identity, Stability” (Huxley 1932/1994, 1), scientists have developed the so-called Bokanovsky process of twinned hatching to tackle the problem of fertility. A receptacle is “immersed in a warm bouillon” of “free-swimming spermatozoa” to grow several eggs that have been detached from their respective ovaries; the fertilised eggs are grown in incubators, where they are immediately separated into the future castes that form the backbone of the social fabric within the diegetic world: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, “[i]dentical twins” produced “not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days […]; actually by dozens, by scores at a time” (ibid. 3–4). Nowhere is Huxley’s

192  Multiplying Twins critique of Fordism more evident than in the detailed monologue of the Centre’s director, who shares his vision of “standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons,” and “[m]illions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology” (5). Twins make notable cameo appearances throughout the book, and though these minions never qualify as fully fledged characters (Huxley’s humanist appeal for civil disobedience inevitably means that his protagonist must be an individualist and an outlaw), they are not the mere background extras that I have dismissed as indicative of ‘incidental twin’ syndrome in Chapter 1. On the contrary, their very existence provides the integral basis for Brave New World’s social strata: twinship for the faceless labourers, but “[o]ne egg, one adult” for “upper-caste boys and girls” (Huxley 1932/1994, 145). As Mustapha Mond explains to John at one point, the Bokanovsky groups are “the foundation on which everything else is built” and “the gyroscope that stabilizes the rocket plane of state on its unswerving course” (202). The novel’s key characters repeatedly voice their instinctive hatred towards these abject creatures, who fulfil the most menial of tasks. At one point, Bernard observes some “Delta-Minus attendants” whom he identifies as “twins, identically small, black and hideous,” and he cannot help but detect “a kind of bestial derision” in their blank eyes (57–58), whereas John, the novel’s tragic rebel, has a rather uncanny encounter at his mother’s death-bed, when “an interminable stream of identical eight-year-old male twins” pours into the room: “Twin after twin, twin after twin, they came – a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated face – for there was only one between the lot of them – puggishly stared, all nostrils and pale goggling eyes” (183). Stepping out of the hospital, John is still haunted by “the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness,” of twins who swarm “like maggots” over the dead body of his mother (190). The vision of “those long rows of identical midgets” queuing for their daily ration of soma (202) already anticipates the countercultural zombie movie of the 1970s, in which the undead serve as allegories of the brainwashed consumer, haunting shopping malls like in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). In Huxley’s bleak vision of the future, there is no unconditional solidarity between the outcast and the hordes of Deltas and Epsilons, as becomes clear whenever the novel’s few self-proclaimed individualists allow themselves to be swept up by their paradoxical yearning for monogamous twinship. When Lenina and Henry dance, the narrator comments that “they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate” (69). Brave New World emerged as an instrumental text of the second ­major wave of dystopian fiction, where the eugenic debate and the killing of ‘unhealthy’ children often feature prominently (Claeys 2010, 112). It is this second wave more than the first which is felt in twentieth-century

Multiplying Twins  193 literature after Huxley, and its influence even extends to the contemporary segment of young adult dystopian fiction, where twinship is revisited under different circumstances. Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993), the first of four novels set in the same dystopian universe, addresses similar topics to Brave New World, particularly the imperative of ‘Sameness’ (with a capital S) and the gruesome consequences that being different entail for the individual. The world of The Giver is one from which all colour has been drained, where people accept a daily dose of medicine to keep them in line, and where only a handful of individuals have access to the rich culture and history of the olden days. Lowry’s take on reproduction owes a huge debt both to Huxley and to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), in that it sees the state seize complete control of family planning. Like in Atwood, ‘birthmothers’ must immediately cede their children to other families: “Two children – one male, one female – to each family unit. It was written very clearly in the rules” (Lowry 1993, 11). Like in so many dystopian tales, death is made taboo: where the clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) ‘complete’ and where the superfluous children of What Happened to Monday (2017)10 are officially put into ‘cryosleep’ (in both cases, euphemisms camouflage the sinister truth), people in The Giver are ‘released’ into the ‘elsewhere,’ especially if they are twins. What signified the desired totalitarian goal of sameness and anonymity in Huxley’s novel becomes a possible disruption in The Giver, which brings us back once again to the key paradox of twinship: being unique by virtue of being identical. Jonas, the protagonist, ponders that the co-presence of “two identical people” would be rather “confusing” (Lowry 1993, 182), and the novel makes it clear that this is reason enough for the state to resort to infanticide. While Jonas’s father explains that one of the twins is chosen “to be nurtured” and the smaller one is “released” (144), Jonas has his gruesome epiphany when he discovers what the allegedly peaceful ceremony actually consists of: his father euthanises one of the twins by injecting a syringe into his scalp. It is not so much a negation of Huxley’s take on twinship (which had some genocidal overtones, too) but more of a historically informed amendment, a bleak coda in the light of historical events that Huxley, writing in 1932, could not have anticipated: the Holocaust and Mengele’s horrendous twin experiments.

Biopolitics of Twinship The term ‘biopolitics’ has undergone various semantisations and attempts to define it over the years, with the result that it remains elusive and rather ambiguous. At one end of the spectrum, it encompasses all kinds of measures to organise the population, but at the other end, there are various ways of “cultivating and weeding out extraordinary individuals; and purifying the race” (Turda 2010, 116). Biopolitics inevitably

194  Multiplying Twins comes with a significant amount of “neo-Darwinian” baggage inasmuch as it tends to put “[pseudo-]evolutionary theory at the center” (Somit/ Peterson 2011, 3). We are thus redirected to the nineteenth-century scientific discourse, when eugenics as conceptualised by Galton ignited an immense debate about how the human race could be improved through breeding (Adams/Allen/Weiss 2005, 234). Never have there been more large-scale attempts to implement it as state policy than in the early twentieth century, which sought to reinstate “the supremacy of the laws of nature over culture and with it the subordination of the individual rights and interests to those of the totalising state” (Turda 2010, 117). The biopolitical discourse that feeds into post-war cloning literature is inextricably linked with eugenics and the concentration camps in ­Germany – I have already highlighted the importance of twin research in 1930s Germany in Chapter 2, and what this meant for the legacy of twin scholarship. The set-up of the camp, which concentrated people in a narrow, confined space, resonated with some of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s previous attempts at studying twins under laboratory conditions. As early as 1936, Kurt Gottschaldt had established twin holiday camps to which he invited nearly 300 German children, systematically observing their behaviour, keeping a record of their sleep patterns, and testing their intelligence over the course of several weeks (Lotze 1937, 129–130). He probably took his cue from Verschuer, who insisted that small children provided the best test twin subjects. This lesson was not lost on a ruthless physician like Josef Mengele, who was constantly on the lookout for suitable Menschenmaterial: “Jews, ‘Gypsies’ and other ‘alien nationals,’ people with physical anomalies, entire families and, best of all, twins” (Schmuhl 2008, 367–368). Once he had handpicked a pair of twins at the ramp, they had ZW (for Zwilling) tattooed on their arms and were brought to their own special block in the camps.11 The experiments carried out by Mengele and his assistants on hundreds of pairs ranged from standard anthropometric measures to torture and murder: twins were put on special diets, injected with bacteria and each other’s blood, starved, sterilised, and killed together so that the comparison could be extended to the post-mortem. It was the horrific culmination of a eugenicist biopolitical system of thought running rampant. This system had evolved from a gradual pathologisation of the body, the various discourses surrounding inheritance and degeneration, and the rise of fascism and genocide, a process that famously prompted ­M ichel Foucault to establish late modernity as the starting point for the emergence of biopolitics. In a lecture delivered at the Collège de France in 1976, he characterises it as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, in that it sees the biological become subjected to state control during that time. In Foucault’s view, the nineteenth century fixed an inherited dissymmetry that used to be typical of sovereign rule, as the sovereign held the

Multiplying Twins  195 power to inflict death, but no privileges regarding the maintenance of life. What with “the right to make live and to let die” having established itself, however (Foucault 2004, 241), the time was ripe for biopolitics, understood by Foucault as a technology of power that encompasses reproduction and fertility rates, statistical estimates and forecasts, the rise of modern demographics, and a number of developments in medicine and hygiene, all of which deal “with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem” (ibid. 245). Foucault’s contention that this political interference was a novelty of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is what Giorgio Agamben famously takes issue with. Agamben’s detailed response to Foucault is at the heart of Homo Sacer (1995), which moves from the ancient differentiation between zoē and bios towards the camp as the ‘nomos’ of the modern (Agamben 1995/1998, 166). For Agamben, the decisive event of zoē (‘bare life’) entering “the sphere of the polis” is “the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power,” which means that there cannot be sovereign power without an exercising of biopolitics,12 and he goes so far as to suggest that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (ibid. 4–6). Agamben does not follow Foucault’s take on sovereignty but rather adopts Carl Schmitt’s musings on the state of exception. The sovereign is defined by the privileges he can exercise when the conventional law is suspended, which places him simultaneously inside and outside the juridical order (Seymour 2013, 100–101). It also makes him the corresponding figure to the paradoxical homo sacer, who is ‘unsacrificeable’ yet can be killed without punishment (Agamben 1995/1998, 84). Careful as Agamben is to emphasise the singularity of the camps as “the exemplary places of modern biopolitics” (ibid. 4), he acknowledges that they did not occur in a historic vacuum. Not only did other countries similarly engage in subjecting prisoners or otherwise institutionalised subjects to sterilisation and medical experiments, the b ­ iopolitically motivated genocide was a catastrophe long in the making. Agamben cites Galton as a major forerunner, and he also credits Verschuer and Fischer, the two most prominent authorities of the KWI, with having supplied “National Socialist biopolitics [with] its fundamental conceptual structure” (146). They provided the framework for the quasi-laboratory ­environment of the concentration camps. Agamben is not the only one to trace this link, what with so many historical records testifying to the KWI’s immense anthrobiological efforts and their immediate biopolitical implications. The institute routinely viewed local populations in terms of selection and adaptation to specific geographic circumstances (Schmuhl 2008, 59–60), which resonated well with the NS Lebensraum philosophy. As scholarly contributions to the topics of race hygiene and eugenics turned state doctrine, the NS state “called upon eugenics to implement

196  Multiplying Twins the population’s biological regeneration” (Turda 2010, 95). Other countries proposed similar laws, but Germany was singular in that it brought politics into direct alignment with ‘bare life,’ a relationship of mutual dependence which resulted in “the genetic romanticism of an extreme biomedical vision” joining forces with “a totalistic political structure” in order to inflict “compulsory sterilization” (Lifton 1986, 24). Given this history and how eagerly the regime adapted its policy to the KWI’s research output, it is a bit rich for Verschuer to argue, as he did after the war, that Germany’s state-controlled race policy meant a complete departure from all the eugenic research that had been going on before (Verschuer 1966, 14), when, on the contrary, the Nuremberg laws and the elimination of life allegedly ‘unworthy of being lived’ were just a radical but nonetheless logical continuation of his earlier efforts. Eugenicists had little trouble and even fewer qualms when it came to anchoring “their ideas of biological rejuvenation into the general programme of national transformation advocated by political leaders” (Turda 2010, 105). When the National Socialists adapted large-scale eugenic measures as part of their agenda, they heralded the most extensive and palpable attempt in history to facilitate biopolitical measurements on the state level, deciding over life and death with all of the bureaucratic power and fanatical rigour that the regime had at its disposal – nowhere more so than in the concentration camps. According to Agamben, the camp is “the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized” (1995/1998, 171). It is here, in this no man’s land of indistinction that ‘bare life’ is manufactured in the thousands, most notably in the shape of Mengele’s Versuchspersonen or ‘test subjects’ (Seymour 2013, 110). For Agamben, these people, “lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence” yet “still biologically alive” (Agamben 1995/1998, 159), are aligned to the homo sacer in that they were ‘dead men walking.’ Sentenced to death yet at the same time walking about the camps, they embodied the “absolute indistinction” of nature and politics to such an extent that not even the guards had a hold over them anymore (ibid. 185), a description that echoes the paradoxical role of Mengele’s twins so strongly that it comes as quite a surprise that Agamben never discusses them. The survivors of Auschwitz would often recall that twins “were not sentenced to death immediately” but that this was “[far from] enough to survive” (Kor 1995, 87); as soon as one of the twins had been murdered or died from exhaustion, the surviving twin was suddenly considered expendable, as Affinity Konar relates in Mischling (2016): “When you became twinless, you had days, maybe a week, before you were reunited with your twin in the mortuary for study” (76). John Burnside’s novel The Dumb House (1997), though not a Holocaust narrative, infuses its narrator with some of that inhumane spirit: he only keeps his twins alive so that he can perform experiments

Multiplying Twins  197 on them. In order to do so, he has to disavow that they are his children, which he does by dehumanising them, labelling them as ‘A’ and ‘B’ so that they become “nothing more to me than laboratory animals” (Burnside 1997/2015, 149). The twins’ special status in the camps was tied somewhat to their mythological baggage. Like Agamben’s homo sacer, who embodies “the ambivalence of the sacred” (Agamben 1995/1998, 75), twins carry strong overtones of the abject, of the divine, as well as of taboo, and while there was nothing that would have made their murder in the camps ‘illegal,’ they were partially exempt from sacrifice. The camp provided an environment completely set on producing identicals, subjecting its prisoners to identical clothing and haircuts, not to mention the inevitably similar, harrowing looks of the tortured, starved victims of atrocities and later, to mass genocide and incineration. In this environment, twins would have carried the mock-auratic reputation of being ‘the real deal.’ If there are no comedies of mistaken identity set in concentration camps, it is not because the respective clichéd tropes have gone out of fashion since the Shakespearean age, but because history has understandably taught us not to make merry of the Holocaust. There is no room for Camp in the camps, as is illustrated by John Boyne’s bestselling though somewhat controversial Auschwitz fable, the highly sentimental Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006). It is brimming with farcical tropes, as its central tragic conceit is based on the close resemblance shared by two boys, one of whom (Shmuel) is a prisoner in the camp and the other (Bruno) the son of the camp’s Kommandant. The boys notice that, once Bruno has had his head shaved because of a lice infestation, they look quite similar, and they also share a birthday: “‘We’re like twins,’ said Bruno. ‘A little bit’, agreed Shmuel” (Boyne 2006, 110). Bruno’s thorough lack of awareness of what is really going on inside the walls of the camp eventually leads to his own death in the gas chamber when he sneaks inside the camp, thus taking the ‘wrong door,’ as is customary in farce. Needless to say, though, the story is never played for laughs, in spite of the rather farcical circumstances, as the sheer weight of the subject matter is far more than farce has ever been trusted to shoulder. There is the near-transcendental component to consider, too. Mengele’s relative autonomy in Auschwitz gave him a degree of sovereign control that led to his subsequent larger-than-life mythologisation into the ‘Angel of Death,’13 a widely feared ruler who benefited from the camp’s permanent state of exception and who routinely picked his test subjects at the ramp. From the moment that prisoners entered, they were sentenced to death, but by answering to the guards’ shouts (“Zwillinge! Zwillinge!”) and by subjecting themselves to experiments, they could return their body to life “or definitively consign it to the death to which it already belong[ed].” In the same breath, Agamben observes that in the camp, “the physician and the scientist move in the no-man’s land into

198  Multiplying Twins which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate” (1995/1998, 159). If the classic twin design is “empirical biopolitics” to begin with (Alford/Hibbing 2008, 187), then the camp afforded a fanatic like Mengele a never-ending supply of Menschenmaterial, the subjects being delivered to the scientist very much as though Huxley’s conveyor belt led directly into their laboratory. At the same time, it is worth pointing out that the various processes of selection which were at work here were a far cry from the methodological ideal Verschuer himself formulated on the eve of World War II: “[an] unbiased series, free from the suspicion of selection” (1939, 78). By contrast, Mengele’s research had its basis in not one but several acts of selection: his own judgement calls at the ramp, and the National-Socialist pseudo-scientific selection process that put so many people on trains headed towards the camps and to almost certain death.

The Boys from Brazil: Breeding the Super-Twin It is a commonplace to argue that any stab at sense-making must cease in the camps, but this has not stopped the imagination from trying to find ways of coming to terms with and formulating this conundrum. Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991), inspired by Robert Jay Lifton’s work on The Nazi Doctors (1986), circumnavigates the problem of representation by reversing the historical chronological order and narrating its story backwards, thus acknowledging “the ‘time out of joint’ of the Holocaust” and fully denying the idea that there is any historical progress in forward movement (Vice 2000, 11–12). Amis’s warped narrative transforms the gas chambers into a place where the air feels “thick and warped with the magnetic heat of creation” and where the dead bodies of Jewish families are delivered on stretchers to undergo a process of ‘reanimation,’ their reverse death struggle recounted as a perverted echo of labour pain: “we cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life” (12). This ghostly image gives us an idea how Amis’s autodiegetic narrator refashions himself into a harbinger of life, in spite of having acted as an assistant to the Mengele-inspired character of ‘Uncle Pepi,’ whose horrible experiments yield further ‘resurrections’: We measure twins together, ‘Uncle Pepi’ and I, for hours and hours: measure measure measure. Even the most skeletal patients thrust their chests out for medical inspection in the last block on the right: a scant fifteen minutes earlier they were flat on the floor of the Inhalationsraum. (Amis 1991/2003, 142) Other post-war fictional accounts of life and death in the camps force surviving Nazis into rather archaic stand-offs with their adversaries. What

Multiplying Twins  199 some of them share with Amis’s novel is their willingness to provoke, for instance, by suggesting that the gas chambers, in however twisted a fashion, did not exclusively produce death, but also life. It is a paradoxical idea prefigured in some accounts of Holocaust survivors, who often refused to believe that the genocidal mayhem of Mengele’s experiments was all about nothing but extinction. Various former concentration camp inmates later claimed that Mengele could not have simply been interested in killing twins and doing harm to them in order to facilitate mass genocide, but that his fervent interest in twins surely must have been in the service of positive eugenics, that is: the secrets of population and procreation. According to one survivor whom Lifton interviewed for his book, Mengele planned to mate male twins with female ones in order to find out whether they were more likely to produce twins themselves; another survivor claims that Mengele “wanted to find the cause of multiple pregnancies in order to be able to repopulate Germany” (qtd. in Lifton 1986, 358). It makes for an odd and rather paradoxical reversal of the traditional scholarly assumptions; after all, early eugenicists had subscribed to the belief “that twins were infertile” (Schwartz 1996, 30); though, needless to say, this belief coexisted with the exact opposite view, as is so often the case with popular twin mythology.14 As soon as we incorporate Mengele’s experiments into “the eugenic crusade to create a super race, a superior race – and finally a master race” (Black 2004, 338), we find the biopolitics of twinship taken to an extreme, at least if we adopt the idea that eugenics, starting with its roots in Galton’s observations on heredity, can be seen as a regenerative force that is linked to the idea of a new race emerging from a big purge (Turda 2010, 94). In simple arithmetic terms, a nation which had suffered severe losses during the war was more likely to recoup them by implementing an efficient policy of repopulation, much in the vein of Brave New World, where the ‘Bukanovsky process’ allows for the multiplication of embryos with the express purpose of stabilising the population. According to one claim voiced by several Auschwitz survivors, Mengele’s actual goal had been “to have each German mother bear as many twins as possible” (qtd. in Black 2004, 356), while Eva Mozes Kor assumes that studying twins was, for Mengele, simply a strategy “to have complete control of genetic engineering” (1995, 108). The most outrageous rumours went so far as to suggest that he was intent on injecting German women with the blood or semen of twins (Lifton 1986, 359), a claim that reads like a prologue to one of the bestselling techno thrillers of the 1970s. Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976) fully explores these fanatical ideas in a suspenseful conspiracy tale about biopolitics and eugenics. Levin’s book fuses various legends surrounding Mengele and his twin experiments with the often sensational discourse about cloning and artificial insemination that frequently made the headlines in the 1970s. The Boys from Brazil casts Mengele in the role of the ‘mad scientist’

200  Multiplying Twins that features so often in dystopian cloning narratives. Having gone into hiding in South America, Mengele impregnates dozens of native women with embryos cloned from Hitler’s DNA, with the express purpose of resurrecting the Führer and securing the “hope and destiny of the Aryan race” (Levin 1976, 21). As he explains to his adversary, Yakov Liebermann, who is modelled on famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal: The boys are exact genetic duplicates of [Hitler]. […] They were conceived in my laboratory, and carried to term by women of the Auiti tribe; healthy, docile creatures with a businesslike chieftain. The boys bear no taint of them; they’re pure Hitler, bred entirely from his cells. He allowed me to take half a liter of his blood and a cutting of skin from his ribs – we were in a Biblical frame of mind – on the sixth of January, 1943, at Wolf’s Lair. He had denied himself children […] because he knew that no son could flourish in the shadow of so […] godlike a father. (Ibid. 232–233) Mengele’s tongue-in-cheek mentioning of his ‘Biblical’ mind-frame and his clear allusion to the creation of Eve, the ultimate cloning myth in Western culture, suggests that he has read up on his mythology. Even the brief nod to the Wolf’s Lair (a moniker based on Hitler’s preferred nickname, ‘Wolf’) as the scene of the transfusion evokes a number of important pre-texts, most notably the story of how twins Romulus and Remus were suckled by the she-wolf. The small mythological allusion is indicative of the regime’s characteristic delusions of grandeur, given how their plans for world domination took their cue from the magnitude of the Roman Empire; why not throw in a Bauopfer for good measure? Elsewhere, The Boys from Brazil engages with different mythologies to emphasise the spiritual dimension of Mengele’s adoration for Hitler. The cloning procedure not only evokes the asexual Immaculate Conception of Mary, it also establishes a ludicrous counter-narrative to the wellknown reports about Hitler’s impotence. Tellingly, it has been suggested that even Galton’s interest in heredity and the future of the British elite may have been prompted by his infertility (Schwartz 1996, 30). As part of the obligatory speech which reveals the full conspiracy and which gives the hero time to plot his retaliation, the closing line of Mengele’s monologue – “Did you really think my work at Auschwitz was aimless insanity?” (Levin 1976, 233) – reads like a deliberate attempt to insert some clichéd villainous megalomania into the novel and thus to reaffirm that the scheme is, of course, ‘aimless insanity.’ However, it also gives voice to the previously indicated idea that there may have been a secret purpose to Mengele’s utterly inhumane experiments, one which has escaped the attention of most observers. The novel thus not only attributes cunning to its larger-than-life villain, it also betrays a grain of

Multiplying Twins  201 perverted hope that maybe, just maybe, all the murder and carnage may have been in the service of an idea that, however distorted, could be seen as more in line with the Hippocratic Oath and the life-preserving aspects of the medical profession. Once the women have given birth to the clones, all of whom are “alike, even more alike than babies usually are” (ibid. 159), the children are taken from them and adopted by foster families all over the world, with the explicit aim of raising them under conditions which mimic the circumstances of Hitler’s parental home as closely as possible, in a meticulously crafted attempt to align the environmental influence with the genetic set-up. Liebermann tries to put the pieces together by consulting a renowned biologist, the aptly named Professor Nürnberger, who lectures him on Mengele’s twin experiments and the elementary components of ‘mononuclear reproduction.’ Within the confines of his pot-boiler, Levin does his best to build a scientifically dubious yet simultaneously plausible case by taking into consideration the levels of both nature and nurture, and he has Nürnberger carefully lay out the environmental side of the argument and how the conspirators try to make sure that the boys are brought up under identical circumstances. However, beneath the textual surface, biological essentialism prevails, particularly during the novel’s pessimistic coda, which strongly suggests that the parental home counts for little once the bloodline has been genetically corrupted. The ambiguous ending notwithstanding, Levin’s novel demonstrates wit and clever craftsmanship in tackling its themes, which strongly underlines once again that different generic approaches to twinship feed on the same tropes, no matter if we are dealing with a slapstick comedy or a dystopian thriller. When Liebermann encounters one of the clones for the first time, he perceives him in front of “a mirror-walled alcove” and thus sees “several boys” enter the room (111), and he later performs a classic double-take when he sees one of the doppelgangers (136), a scene that prefigures his central epiphany as the moment when he literally puts two and two together. Like in Lifton’s concept of the Faustian self, the idea of doubling extends to the surviving Nazis that are involved in the eugenic conspiracy. All of them lead doppelganger existences, having adopted aliases and established new families following the downfall of the Third Reich, and the theme of deceptive appearances aligns The Boys from Brazil with Levin’s most well-known work, The Stepford Wives (1972), in which a sect of suburban husbands kill their free-spirited wives in order to replace them with feeble-minded, sexually submissive robot clones. By virtue of its equally satirical and thrilling juxtaposition of historical material and current ethical and scientific debates, The Boys from Brazil has emerged as one of the most frequently discussed texts in the academic study of cloning in literature, though with the caveat that it is often only alluded to in passing or sidelined in favour of its

202  Multiplying Twins Academy Award-nominated feature film adaptation, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier (1978). It thus shares the fate of Priest’s The Prestige and its subsequent adaptation, which suggests once again that the physical co-presence of twins and clones often has a stronger impact in visual media. Like in any other adaptation, though, the text is there as the spectral ghost in the machine, and the posters of both films are quite suggestive in that respect. Both of them place the disembodied heads of their conjurors and multipliers above the silhouettes of the mapped territory and the female foils whom they colonise and impregnate (Fig. 6.3). Like Brave New World, The Boys from Brazil is regularly singled out as a key text amongst the various dystopian takes on the theme of cloning, though it rarely receives credit for engaging in a rather detailed fashion with the eugenics and biopolitics of the NS era. Levin’s appropriation of well-known historic figures somewhat obscures the fact that his novel, like Huxley’s, also looks into the future. As a well-constructed genre piece, The Boys from Brazil may be more interested in playing on our fears than in being scientifically accurate, yet it is quite spot-on in dating the resurgence of the cloning debate to the last decade of the millennium. Following his conversation with Nürnberger, Liebermann has a harrowing nightmare in which he envisions the effects of an army of “grown-up adult Hitlers” who might, in the future, “join forces and wage again (with 1990 weapons!) their first one’s racial war.” (Levin 1976, 195)

Fig. 6.3  Posters for The Boys from Brazil and The Prestige.

Multiplying Twins  203 Though cloning was far from being a widely practised procedure in the 1990s, the decade saw cloning enter into the realm of the feasible with the well-publicised case of Dolly, and if The Boys from Brazil never gets round to explicitly singling out the importance of cloning animals in the run-up towards cloning human beings, this is because it does not have to. The motif of stellar breeding is very much present throughout the novel, not just in the Doberman pedigrees in the house where Liebermann and Mengele eventually face off, but even more so in the way in which Mengele and his fanatical supporters are obsessed with the idea of procreation and pure-blooded offspring. They regularly host “Miss Nazi” pageants, and Mengele is aroused by one former winner’s f­ ertility  – “pregnant, four months” (ibid. 166) – much more than by her pretty looks. As focalised through the eyes of Mengele, the novel leaves out no opportunity to draw attention to various thoroughbreds of sterling pedigree like her. Mengele is obsessed with repopulating the world with his Nazi clones, but his own inclinations mark his obsession as a rather narcissistic and masturbatory one: he ‘fathers’ children only in the lab and is sexually aroused by women who are already pregnant to begin with. The fascist overtones of ‘immaculate breeding’ are also at the heart of one of the most commercially successful twin comedies ever to come out of Hollywood, and one which shares a number of biopolitical axioms with The Boys from Brazil: Twins (1988), one of several explorations of cloning and breeding starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.15 Where one of the geneticists in The Boys from Brazil dreamed of “the improved quality of the population in two or three generations” once the master race had been encouraged to reproduce and “the inferior ones” prohibited from doing so (Levin 1976, 184), Twins shows us what the Herculean results could look like. It casts Schwarzenegger as Julius, the product of a secret government experiment, “a physically, mentally, and spiritually advanced human being” compiled from the sperm of six fathers with “genetic excellence,” as the film’s expository voice-over narration intones. The narrator is Professor Werner, a German scientist, who bears a rather uncanny resemblance to Laurence Olivier in the role of the Mengele-inspired White Angel in Marathon Man (1976). Julius eventually leaves Werner, his mentor, to go looking for his twin brother, and in the process finds Vincent (played by Danny DeVito), his complete opposite in physique, intellect, and moral disposition. In spite of Vincent’s reluctance to believe that both were, as he puts it, produced from the same “sperm milk-shake,” the two brothers go on a quest to seek out their biological mother and the details of their inception. A scientist eventually explains to them that their twinship embodies the Nazi distinction between ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ life: “All the purity and strength went into Julius. All the crap that was left over went into what [Vincent] see[s] in the mirror every morning”. Though the events leading up to the film’s obligatory happy ending are meant to refute Vincent’s conviction that he

204  Multiplying Twins is, in his own words, “genetic garbage,” Twins does, in fact, very little to bear this out and repeatedly posits DeVito’s body as “a legible sign of all the ‘crap’ of humanity” (Clarke 2008). Marie Phillips’ novel Oh, I Do Like to Be … (2019), loosely based on The Comedy of Errors (1594), later uses the same set-up for another spin on the twin experiment: one sibling is cloned from Shakespeare’s DNA, while the other is dismissed as “a waste of a test tube” (Phillips 2019, 83), The Boys from Syracuse meeting The Boys from Brazil. In spite of its fervent plea not to discard the level of nurture, Twins very much embraces biological determinism, not least because it stars “a man who had both won Mr Olympia and allegedly professed a longing to have been ‘one of those Teutonic breeders’” (Saunders 2009, 133). The film’s self-proclaimed stance in favour of egalitarianism is thus repeatedly undercut by its investment in biology, particularly by Schwarzenegger’s impressive physique. By characterising the antagonistic Klane brothers as ‘natural crooks’ or by associating the Italian-American character of Vincent with petty crime, Twins applies some of the same essentialism that propelled the early eugenic movement and its interest in criminality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It thus becomes quite easy to draw a line from Twins to National-Socialist biopolitics. Studies of Schwarzenegger’s exceptional film career have frequently commented on the fascist iconography and the Nazi associations that his thick accent and his body carry into his films (Greven 2017, 64–65), and while that case has more frequently been made for monosyllabic killing machines like Conan the Barbarian or the leather-clad Terminator, it is no less true for Twins, a film that fully succumbs to the Übermensch rhetoric that has permeated both Schwarzenegger’s career and the tenets of National Socialism. Both are big on the idea that there needs to be a ‘new man’ to purge the breed of decades of degeneration, and that eugenics and racial hygiene are the way forward. Schwarzenegger’s filmic output saw him don the persona of the “man of steel, welded into his iconic form through the furnace of self-will and exercise” (Williams 2012, 20), and his sheer will to reinscribe the body with signifiers of invincibility harks back directly to classic eugenics. Marvin T. Prosono notes that fascism, in that era, “became a Fascism of the skin, attempting to restore a form of mechanical solidarity to a modern world order that was in the process of quickly outgrowing it” (2008, 638), and Schwarzenegger emerged as the iconic face (or, more to the point, the iconic torso) of this idea’s resurgence in 1980s Reaganite America, his body regime bordering on the “cultivation of an Aryan physical image” (ibid. 650). Fittingly, Twins concludes with a brief epilogue that is meant to ­sugar-coat the bitter pill of its biopolitical fanaticism, but the resulting image – Julius and Vincent have married their girlfriends and are now themselves fathers of twins – is rather grotesque. Not only does it underline once more that genes prove infinitely stronger than the nurturing

Multiplying Twins  205

Fig. 6.4  Efficient breeding marks the happy ending (Twins).

forces of a shared social environment, and that the elite should breed amongst themselves to keep things in the family (the twins have married sisters), it also enacts Huxley’s Bokanovsky vision of effective breeding with exponential growth (Fig. 6.4). Moreover, the concluding scene, a harshly lit orgy of whiteness, frantically attempts to overwrite the film’s racialised subtexts,16 reassuring us that the master race has prevailed, after all, and even Vincent, the ‘abomination’, has been absorbed into a tableau of effective breeding. A similar fantasy of healing permeates formulaic fiction about sinister cloning conspiracies.

The Third Twin: Attack of the Evil Clones One of the most frequently cited arguments against cloning is that it represents an asexual form of reproduction, which some of cloning’s most fervent critics tend to interpret as a particularly nasty kick in the crotch, or at least as a major threat: the prospect of men no longer being needed in order to sustain the reproductive cycle (Wulff 2005, 144). Even though it is now an established fact that asexual reproduction does occur in nature, too, philosophers like Baudrillard or Žižek tend to treat it as an exclusive feature of cloning, with Baudrillard in particular attacking the practice repeatedly on these very grounds. He acknowledges “the transition from protozoan, bacterial, undifferentiated cell-division”

206  Multiplying Twins towards “sexual reproduction” as “the greatest revolution in the history of living beings,” and claims that cloning leads us back to “the biological monotony of the earlier state” (1997/2002, 196–197). Not only does his argument suggest that cloning is about the creation of “a substitute for sexual reproduction” as much as it is about “[t]he dream of eternal twins” (1990, 168), he even goes so far as to characterise it as a radical negation of the parents as well as of “the joint act that is procreation” (1981, 96), though the insult levelled against the father undoubtedly weighs heavier for him. By the same token, Deleuze’s understanding of the simulacrum is all about a gesture “‘against the father’” and the ­purity of his lineage (1990, 257). Inasmuch as cloning has been wedded to a certain media narrative that involves important props like lab coats and test tubes in the act of hatching children ab ovo, the implication is that sexual intercourse moves from the bedroom towards the laboratory, accompanied by all the gruesome associations that entails. According to Baudrillard, what with our death drive pushing us towards pre-sexual forms of reproduction, the uterus is but an “ephemeral” presence at this stage. In a piece provocatively titled No Sex Please, We’re Post-Human, Žižek similarly suggests that the age of cloning signals “the end of sexuality,” and that the age of virtual reality will render useless all the “‘enhanced’ possibilities of sexual life” (2009). Though clones must not be conflated with twins, the rising numbers of twin pregnancies in the age of in-vitro fertilisation seems to suggest a similar development. John Harris argues that there is no categorical difference between cloning and assisted reproduction (2004, 42), and as a simple advance in technology, IVF treatments were “as significant a genealogical marker” as “the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996” (Haran et al. 2008, 19). IVF pregnancies have found their way into fiction, too, and tend to be aligned with twins and the spectre of illegitimacy that is part of their intertextual baggage. Paula, the narrator in Graham Swift’s novel Tomorrow (2007), ponders telling her twins that her husband is not, in fact, their biological father. Throughout her recollections, the intrusion of the donor sperm into the couple’s domestic life produces a shared family history, but it simultaneously sows the seed of marital discontent and thus threatens to disrupt the family unit that it has brought into being in the first place. This ambiguity is expressed by the sheer fact of twinship as much as by Paula’s rhetoric, which frequently resorts to double entendres: “A stranger slipped that day into our lives – an unfortunate phrase, since that’s just what he didn’t do, or not exactly, yes and no. […] I don’t seem to be able to get away from awkward puns” (Swift 2007, 187). While highbrow fiction like Swift’s novel uses the twin trope to up the stakes and to double up on the potential anxieties surrounding the family unit once its biological ties threaten to become severed, formulaic fiction tends to be more grounded in the respective scientific debates, albeit with questionable implications.

Multiplying Twins  207 Ken Follett’s bestselling novel The Third Twin (1996) is a case in point; a rather on-the-nose piece of topical fiction that addresses the prevalent cloning debate of the 1990s, its publication following hot on the heels of the well-publicised birth of Dolly. A typical techno thriller, Follett’s book employs tested plot formulae and infuses them with “advanced technological devices […] to heighten the threat posed by the plot’s antagonist” (Stableford 2006, 518). The main character, Jeannie Ferrami, is a genetic researcher who specialises in heritability and criminality and who repeatedly acts as a mouthpiece for various items of information Follett derives from the history of twin scholarship. It is no coincidence that Ferrami, at one point, adopts the alias of Susan L. Farber, one of the world’s leading twin psychologists (Follett 1996/2014, 380). In her research, Ferrami sets out to prove that “a certain type of personality is inherited – a combination of impulsiveness, daring, aggression, and hyperactivity” (ibid. 70). Her initial scientific belief system appears borderline naïf and outdated, as though Francis Galton’s collected writings still served as the sole input for young researchers practising genetics on elite campuses in the United States, which makes it easy for the novel to subject its protagonist to a thorough learning process. This constellation is indicative of how the novel’s surface feminism – a bright young female researcher using her Sherlockian skills of deduction to unravel a horrific conspiracy spearheaded by the male plutocracy – is mercilessly undercut by its misogynistic and exploitative subtexts, as the protagonist is increasingly patronised and forced to succumb to the generic framework. Follett, never one to hold back on the melodrama, burdens his heroine with adversities of almost biblical proportions. Not only is the hard-up geneticist the daughter of a convict and thus forced to ponder whether or not “she had his criminal genes or not” (168), a case of sexual assault that occurs on her university campus also puts her on the track of a conspiracy with strong overtones of The Boys from Brazil. When she sets out to prove that her new boyfriend Steve is not the sociopathic rapist who haunts the campus, in spite of eye-witness accounts that identify him as the culprit, Ferrami discovers that he has several doppelgangers. The co-presence of these men, whose paths will cross in unlikely ways over the course of the novel, is the result of experiments carried out by a multi-million dollar conglomerate in the 1970s; a set-up that resonates with the political climate post-Watergate and the decade’s characteristic cinema of paranoia, of which Schaffner’s The Boys from Brazil adaptation is a belated example. Several women have been impregnated with identical embryos as a kind of trial run in order to eventually repopulate the country with a master race of “law-abiding, churchgoing, family-­ oriented white America[ns]” (132) who are all “intelligent, aggressive, and blond” (355). The eponymous ‘third twin’ makes for a catchy title and an appealing paradox, though the number remains questionable: the reader later learns that there may have been as many as eight children,

208  Multiplying Twins which makes the plot resonate with the manifold legends surrounding Mengele’s experimental attempts “to spawn twins – or even better, triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets” to ensure “that the planned super race would remain super” (Black 2004, 348). No wonder that the ageing white supremacists who are behind the scheme are cut from the same cloth as Levin’s senile über-Nazis, and no less worried about the future of their race and the country. One of the conspirators, who habitually rubs shoulders with right-wing icons like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, explains that the cloning scheme was a reaction to “America going to hell: civil rights for Negroes, Mexicans flooding in, the best schools being swamped by the children of Jewish Communists, our kids smoking pot and dodging the draft” (Follett 1996/2014, 39). Their attempt to counter the country’s alleged deterioration into cultural hybridity and miscegenation has strong echoes of the eugenic cleansing programme of the National Socialists. A similar plot device propels another bestselling twin thriller of the 1990s, JeanChristophe Grangé’s Les rivières pourpres (Blood-Red Rivers, 1997), set in an elitist university town whose own gene pool has become impoverished through generations of inbreeding. The members of this “wornout community,” hell-bent on creating their own breed of supermen, turn to their physically vigorous rural neighbours to find new blood, abducting local children to “fuse together the academics’ brain power and the natives’ physical prowess” (Grangé 1997/2016, 306–307). In Grangé’s version of the eugenic conspiracy, the twins are not part of the scheme but act as a spanner in the works, murdering the key conspirators by pooling their intellectual and physical abilities, “a sort of twoheaded dragon” (325). Where Grangé offers a bleak vision of the ivory tower participating in ruthless biopolitics, Follett’s novel comes up with “Genetico Inc.,” a company about to be taken over by a German conglomerate and run by a fifth column of mad scientists. The sinister background story of how the CIA funds their experiments in order to counter a breeding program run by the Soviets might well be from a Cold War-era conspiracy thriller infused with subliminal fantasies of American re-empowerment. While the novel remains ambiguous regarding the villain’s key conviction that “a human being is his DNA” and that “a human being’s genetic inheritance is more important than his upbringing and environment” (Follett 1996/2014, 261), it is also rather divided in its political stance. It is true that The Third Twin reiterates the reactionary view according to which the overall deterioration of the country is simply to be taken for granted  – a view that, strangely, unites Follett’s protagonists and ­antagonists – but it also resonates with some of the leftist critique put forward by Baudrillard and others: the history of research into the genetic code is tied up with the discourse about its possible commodification, and Genetico Inc. is the embodiment of these fears.

Multiplying Twins  209 What is considerably less ambiguous is the novel’s essentialism when it comes to sexuality and gender identity. In order to counter the threat of Genetico’s Nazist, dehumanised take on lab-based procreation and population control, The Third Twin allows sexuality to roam free, neatly organising it into a binary system of ‘good’ and ‘bad sex’ that structures the novel even more consistently than its nature/nurture divide. Follett milks some minor suspense from the ‘will they, won’t they’ dynamic of mutual attraction in the pairing of Jeannie and Steve, aligning the development of their heterosexual romance over the tightly knit ‘race against time’ plot with the inevitability of getting hero and heroine into bed together, the eventual consummation of their relationship acting as the mutual ‘reward’ that is characteristic of the classic Hollywood film plot. The novel is quite content with this arrangement, and indeed, one of its central leitmotifs is the constantly reiterated claim that men and women are ‘just the way they are,’ a conviction voiced by supposed beacons of scientific excellence like Ferrami herself. The book’s essentialist take on gender identity thus merges with its sexual politics, but tellingly, its binary simplicity cannot be reconciled to the demands of the twinship theme. On the one hand, The Third Twin exonerates upright Steve, the ‘good twin’ emerging from a gene pool that produces sociopathic predators and evil personified, by arguing that our genes do not determine our fate. On the other hand, however, there is the constant suggestion that all men are potential rapists and sadists like Steve’s ‘evil twins,’ the brutal policemen who torture him, the ill-tempered conspirators, and the academic alpha males who drop Ferrami as soon as she fails to comply with the established hierarchy. The novel never offers a corrective to the protagonist’s thought that “any tall white man on the street,” no matter if it is a pizza delivery boy or a pious churchgoer, could be the wanted rapist (Follett 1996/2014, 31), and it implicitly suggests that women must simply adjust to the facts of life by incorporating some of the most misogynistic view-points prevalent in rape discourse into its narrative arrangement: victims of sexual assault are in effect blamed for dressing too provocatively and for being too talkative when it comes to relating their ordeal. Rather than offering a corrective, The Third Twin inserts ‘good sex’ as a kind of sedative into the proceedings to keep a lid on some of the more savage aspects of male-female relations, and to restore some faith in the healing powers of ‘natural’ biopolitics, some overtones of the bed-trick motif and its customary sexual anarchy notwithstanding. In the process, Follett’s novel seeks to pacify some of Baudrillard’s fear that the reproduced clone may ‘have’ sexuality, but only of the non-­ reproductive kind. However, The Third Twin implicitly embraces a eugenic programme that is cut from the same cloth as fascist biopolitics by having Steve the clone mate with genetic researcher Jeannie, whose name bears the phonetic imprint of the ‘gene’ as well as the ‘genie from

210  Multiplying Twins the bottle,’ to supplement Steve, the baby from the test tube. The elite continue to breed amongst themselves, and the novel concludes with the protagonist introducing the “charming college boy” (146) to her mother, which means that the threat of multiplication is only averted in order for the survivors to multiply, after all. The abominations and evil-doers, on the other hand, are either executed or subjected to imprisonment without any hope for reform. There is some blunt symmetry in Jeannie’s best friend, Lisa, being raped by ‘evil twin’ Harvey, while Jeannie gets to enjoy Steve, the well-adjusted hunk who sometimes feels deadly rage erupting inside him yet who is ultimately acknowledged to be “not a rapist” (93), just so that we can be sure. The customary happy ending thus subjects Steve to domestication; an option clearly not available to ‘bad twin’ Neville in Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), although similar obstacles are stacked against him. On the meta-level of literary production, Follett himself emerges as a gifted cloning artist who has forged dozens of bestselling novels from his tested formulae, as if to acknowledge the Aristotelian dictum that a single act of intercourse can be enough to produce “numerous offspring, one of which is later than another” (Aristotle 1943, 449), as long as there is enough semen to begin with. Fittingly, the author who holds court over the cloning debate in The Third Twin has himself been involved in a number of plagiarism suits (Ramet 2015, 116). Not that ‘originality’ is a safe criterion for separating the wheat from the chaff in fiction: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), in many ways the definitive text on twins and eugenics at the turn of the millennium, also came under critical attack for being derivative.

White Teeth: Of Mice and Twins White Teeth is a fitting coda to the twentieth-century’s history of literature and twinship, not just because it was one of the first great publishing events of the year 2000, but also because it brings together various aspects that inform modern twin scholarship. Smith’s novel, which has been characterised as “The Satanic Verses for the age of the Human Genome Project” (Huggan 2010, 761), is by turns suspenseful and farcical, touches upon serious themes yet simultaneously makes light of them, plays with multiplication and confusion, and puts a fresh spin on the mythological lore surrounding the shady origins of twinship. It is also indebted to the set-up of the classical twin experiment, reflecting much of the historical baggage of eugenics. A ‘Black British’ novel that was hailed as a ground-breaking debut and, subsequently, derided as an all-too-clever and self-aware demonstration of narrative hyperactivity, White Teeth not only mines traditional myths and pre-texts, it occasionally partakes in myth as a genre, not shying away from tropes linked to fate and destiny.

Multiplying Twins  211 The kernel of Smith’s multigenerational epic, which intertwines the lives of three London-based families of different ethnicities and religions, is located in the random encounter of Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones, who meet as young men in Europe during the last days of World War II. When a Russian soldier points out the nearby home of a French eugenicist who is rumoured to have “worked in a scientific capacity for the Nazis since before the war,” mainly “[o]n the sterilization program, and later the euthanasia policy” (Smith 2000, 90), Samad convinces Archie that it is their duty to kill the doctor; unbeknownst to Samad, however, Archie spares the man’s life, and the lie on which their friendship rests will come back to haunt them almost half a century later. By this time, their own children have struck up an unlikely acquaintance with the Chalfens, a Jewish family whose pater familias, a renowned geneticist, is a mentee of the Mengele-inspired doctor whom Samad believes dead. This plot-twist, which is very much akin to the force of Nemesis in Greek tragedy, wraps up White Teeth in a manner that invokes Marx’s dictum about history occurring once as tragedy and the second time as farce, as the book culminates in a rather farcical dénouement that involves countless deceptions and misapprehensions, including twins being confused for one another.17 In addition to making the novel come full circle, the climax suggests rather offhandedly that post-war genetic research would not have been feasible without the work of Nazi eugenicists. When Archie, much to the chagrin of his friend, saves Perret’s life yet again by catching a bullet intended for the old man, Samad’s somewhat hypocritical dismissal of scientists ‘playing God’ and of the whole eugenic project has likewise caught up with him, which highlights the fact that he is no less motivated by a desire to fight for the purity of his ‘bloodline’ than the French doctor (Dawson 2007, 158). As a father of twins, Samad has become involved in an ethically dubious experiment of his own making – one that is fuelled by his growing consternation at the erosion of his family’s cultural identity in England. As a man of letters relegated to waiting tables in an Indian restaurant, facing everyday racism and his sons’ gradual withdrawal from what he, rather insincerely, perceives to be their sacred heritage as Bengali Muslims, Samad cannot bear the prospect of his sons assimilating in their different ways. His decision to send one of them back to Bangladesh is born from his wish to subject his family to a stern ‘back to the roots’ regime as much as from his tangible discomfort at the idea of being around twins in the first place. Not only are they a financial burden, his wife Alsana, in the spirit of ‘divine twin’ mythology, has also removed Samad from the genealogical narrative by playing down his role in the conception of the children. This passivity is reflected in Samad’s impression that he has “caught children like a disease” (105), and his detachment becomes clear in his contempt for the second-born son, troublemaker Millat: “the catch-up kid” who lost “that first race down the birth canal,” “the loser of two

212  Multiplying Twins vital minutes that he would never make up” (181). Having long thought about which of his two sons will have the ‘privilege’ of leaving England, Samad ends up sending Magid, his secret favourite, and the whimsy of his decision finds a fitting punishment in Alsana’s reaction: she resorts to never ever giving her husband a straightforward answer again. Like the outcome of the experiment itself, this state of permanent epistemic uncertainty is a deliberate throwback to the nineteenth century, where the twin acts as a whetstone against which the emerging discipline of detection sharpens its tools in order to find out whether you can ever be sure and define anything with certainty. Because Samad can only afford to send one of them abroad, he inadvertently recreates the well-known experimental set-up of ‘same genes, different environment,’ even though these categories mean nothing to him. When a teacher compliments him on the “good genes” he has passed on to his sons, Samad has no idea what she is talking about (113). Magid’s absence turns him into “a ghostly daguerreotype formed from the quicksilver of the father’s imagination” (180), a metaphor that foreshadows his subsequent return as an uncanny Other in the spirit of the nineteenth-century colonial twin tale: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories or Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I have discussed in Chapter 5, were indicative of this trend. However, the young man who returns from Bangladesh a few years later is not the familiar revenant whom the generic pre-texts teach us to expect; in fact, he may still be Millat’s spitting image, but he is, in fact, a stranger to everyone in his family. By separating Magid and Millat, the novel investigates the idea of cultural identity as a split one, in the spirit of Homi Bhabha’s take on “the ‘Janus-faced discourse of the nation’” (Rastogi 2016, 86). Bhabha, in his musings on colonial mimicry, talks about “the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia,” and he constantly aligns them with acts of doubling and adaptation and with “authorized versions of otherness” that inevitably breed schizophrenic identities (2004, 131 and 126). The paradoxical nature of mimicry is borne out by the unlikely outcome of the experiment, which completely reverses Samad’s expectations. While Millat, the son who remained in England, joins a gang of Islamic fundamentalists, it is Magid who returns “a pukka Englishman” who eats pork and talks like David Niven (Smith 2000, 336). Samad cannot help but think that this is not his son but “some clone” (350). Given his status as a ‘failed experiment,’ it is somewhat fitting that Magid should become friends with Marcus Chalfen, whose office is adorned with portraits of Mendel, Crick, and Watson. The Chalfens fancy themselves as well-meaning, progressive thinkers, but they are revealed to be no less fervent and aggressive than a religious fundamentalist when it comes to inflicting their own brand of culture, ‘Chalfenism,’ on the world, and the language of cloning is never far off when the narrative voice, with characteristic irony, sketches their self-contained

Multiplying Twins  213 bubble: their dinner table is “an exercise in mirrored perfection” where the ­family members stare at “clones of each other” in endless reflections during meal-times, while Marcus’s wife Joyce is content with giving birth to numerous children who are all “smaller versions of Marcus” (Smith 2000, 260–262). However, the family does not seem to be in ideological agreement when it comes to their attitude towards the nature/­nurture debate. Joyce, the author of a popular book on cross-­ pollination, emerges as an essentialist who asks Millat where he is from “originally” (ibid. 265); Marcus, in turn, acknowledges that the very existence of his newly found assistant Magid is the perfect argument “against genetic determinism,” given how different the twins are. In spite of his proclamation that twinning is simply a different manifestation of his area of expertise, cloning, Marcus finds himself drawn to the twins and the riddle of their unlikely existence. Even though he is unlikely to subscribe to Benjamin or to Baudrillard’s ill-tempered dismissal of cloning as a ‘cancerous’ proliferation of the loss of aura, Marcus becomes one of the few characters in the novel to appreciate twinship and to frown upon the fundamentalism embodied by what the novel offers as “the two dominant critiques of biotechnology: the theological and the ethical” (Dawson 2007, 171). White Teeth remains a novel full of typically postmodern scepticism towards ideologies, which becomes manifest in the narrative’s constant ironic detachment. When Smith addresses the ‘spiritual’ bond between Magid and Millat, she mimics the omniscient narrator of the eighteenth-century novel, who always seems to rub shoulders with the reader, in order to comment on how the twins experience similar illnesses and accidents while being many miles apart. The example offered by the narrator may be a factual reporting of how the twins both have a brush with death at around the same time, but the anecdote is firmly tongue-in-cheek and puts yet another layer of ironic distance between fabula and diegesis.18 The same is true of the subplot that propels the novel towards its climax once Magid has returned from Bangladesh: the launch of Marcus Chalfen’s FutureMouse©, a genetically manipulated animal that promises to put humanity in a position of being “not victims of the random but instead directors and arbitrators of our own fate” (Smith 2000, 357). His work on FutureMouse© prompts Marcus to proclaim that the “royalties deal” has changed to “80 percent God, 20 percent me” (283), for he rewrites its genetic code, implanting it with cancer cells in order to exactly prescribe its life-span. The sheer determinism that shapes the animal’s existence makes Magid perceive it as the perfect supplement to his own random, twinned existence: One mouse only. No battle down the birth canal, no first and ­second, no saved and unsaved. No potluck. No random factors. No you have your father’s snout and your mother’s love of cheese. No mysteries

214  Multiplying Twins lying in wait. No doubt as to when death will arrive. No hiding from illness, no running from pain. No question about who was pulling the strings. No doubtful omnipotence. No shaky fate. No question of a journey, no question of greener grass, for wherever this mouse went, its life would be precisely the same. […] No other roads, no missed opportunities, no parallel possibilities. No second-guessing, no what-ifs, no might-have-beens. Just certainty. Just certainty in its purest form. (Smith 2000, 405) But the love-child of Magid and Marcus eventually escapes its creators during the farcical climax, proving itself as the novel’s ultimate agent of resistance and thus ending White Teeth on a hopeful note. The mouse is clearly modelled on OncoMousetm, the controversial “technobastard” that Donna Haraway reads as a secular creation embedded in Christian typology: “S/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our mortality in a powerful, historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of salvation – a ‘cure for cancer’” (Haraway 1997, 78–79). The novel’s critical take on how the harbingers of scientific progress join forces with the doctors of Auschwitz and how said progress is exclusively measured by its market value may ultimately not differ so much from Follett’s Third Twin – indeed, the very spelling of FutureMouse© “satirizes the copyrighting of the human genome sequence” (Tew 2010, 56) in a manner very much akin to Follett’s drastic depiction of Genetico Inc., a company that commits atrocities to protect its multiplied assets. But where Follett’s book secretly embraces essentialism and the very same fascist ideas of purity and white supremacy that it appears to deride, White Teeth celebrates hybridity and the virtues of comic ambiguity. This is also borne out by the way in which the novel draws parallels between FutureMouse© and the unborn baby of Irie Jones, Archie’s daughter, who conceives a child once she has had sex with both of the twins, in a deliberate attempt to obscure the child’s parentage. Irie takes obvious comfort in the impossibility of ever knowing with certainty “the identity of the father. No test on earth would tell her. […] Because whichever brother it was, it was the other one too. She would never know” (Smith 2000, 426). The novel closes with a tableau that looks ahead into the new millennium: the bucolic image of an impromptu family gathering by the beach, with “Irie’s fatherless little girl writ[ing] affectionate postcards to Bad Uncle Millat and Good Uncle Magid” (ibid. 448). This, then, may be the ultimate reversal of the mythological twin baggage: unlike the divine pater familias Zeus, who occasionally managed to father children without involving any female (Ferreira 2005, 110), Irie Jones exploits the rich gene pool of the Iqbal boys but brings up her daughter as part of a matriarchal environment to mirror the fate of “Pinocchio, a puppet

Multiplying Twins  215 clipped of paternal strings” (Smith 2000, 448). Moreover, she exorcises the ghosts of fascist biopolitics by reversing its central equation: instead of using one twin to father multiple children, Irie sleeps with two men to father one child, thus streamlining the novel’s twinned binaries into a heartfelt plea for individualism that is distinctly not undercut and diffused with Smith’s trademark irony. White Teeth thus closes the book on a long and complicated history of twin relations and simultaneously throws a cautious yet optimistic glance into the future.

Notes 1 Actually, make that two celebrated illusionists: Nolan co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan (alas, not a twin), who went on to co-create HBO’s Westworld (2016), another meta-reflexive labyrinth of doubles and androids. 2 To be fair, the novel suggests that Borden’s diary has been tinkered with by Angier, so that we can never be sure whether it was Borden himself who left the clues in there. 3 Historically, the ampersand evolved from the Roman letters e and t flowing together. 4 This genealogy also extends to the filmmaker. In Nolan’s version of The Prestige, Tesla’s machine resembles an early photographic camera, particularly with “the white flash that accompanies its duplication of anything presented before it” (Olson 2015, 57). 5 Genetically speaking, “identical twins qualify as clones” (Segal 2017, 229), but not vice versa: clones are not simultaneously conceived, they do not have the same parents, nor do they share intrauterine environment, birth place, rearing home (ibid. 231). 6 Ironically, Baudrillard has a tendency of xeroxing his own previous musings by republishing the same material under different titles. 7 The film adaptation of The Boys from Brazil employed Derek Bromhall, who had done extensive work on rabbit cloning, as a scientific adviser. It is his theoretical set-up which is acted out in the film’s laboratory scene and which subsequently gained some degree of fame as the only (visible) model of cloning (Haran et al. 2008, 31). 8 This observation goes back to Schwartz, who argues that the literary treatment of the twin motif moves from ancient comedies towards more serious “object lessons in philosophical and then scientific debates over the tractability of human nature” (1996, 29). 9 Jurassic World approaches the theme of the dysfunctional family unit and the ‘disturbed’ gender order via two symptoms that ultimately point at the same underlying problem: that of the working mother whose dedication to her job threatens to disrupt the family unit, and that of the lonely spinster whose professionalism only thinly veils her secret desire to be taken by a ‘real man’ – in this case, the dashing Owen Grady, the park’s animal-tamer but also the ‘tamer of the shrew.’ The film’s take on cloning directly mirrors this dysfunctional state of affairs, for it indicates that a society which has allowed women to abandon their ‘natural’ habitat will give birth to monsters. It is not a coincidence that the Indominus Rex mirrors the park’s operations manager Claire Dearing in a number of respects: both are associated with the colour white and the theme of isolation, both are lacking in social skills, and both are perceived as reckless predators by their environment.

216  Multiplying Twins 10 In What Happened to Monday, septuplets share one existence and are each assigned one day of the week to go out, in order to avoid the euthanasic measures that the state inflicts upon every family that dares to disobey its one-child policy. 11 Twins allegedly enjoyed some privileges that other prisoners did not have, though the details remain controversial (see Lifton 1986, 352). 12 See Agamben’s detailed critique of Foucault (1995/1998, 4–6). Donna Haraway has been similarly vocal in attacking Foucault’s take on biopolitics; the respective debate is summarised by Rosi Braidotti, who argues for a reconceptualisation of zoē as a less anthropocentric force in order to broaden “the sense of community by acknowledging its non-human components” and to establish a “new pan-humanity” (Braidotti 2012, 75). 13 The metaphor has rather ambiguous implications. While many feared Mengele as a cruel sadist utterly lacking in empathy, to others, being chosen by him meant they had a minimal chance of survival. Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, acknowledges that the children “had some kind thoughts for [Mengele] because, after all, had it not been for him, we would have surely been condemned to death” (1995, 105). 14 As Swift’s narrator in Tomorrow muses, They say you’re less selfish, you’ve learnt to share. They say you’re the opposite: you’re selfishness times two. There’s nothing you won’t do for each other in the eternal struggle with non-twins. Or, then again, […] you’re really at war with each other: sibling rivalry without limits. (Swift 2007, 207) 15 Junior (1994), the project that reunited the stars of Twins with director Ivan Reitman, sees Schwarzenegger’s physician embark on the ultimate patriarchal project to cure men once and for all of womb envy: he inseminates himself. The 6th Day (2000), by contrast, is a dystopian thriller in which Schwarzenegger comes face to face with his own clone who threatens to ­absorb his identity; the film was released four years before Schwarzenegger, as Governor of California, championed Proposition ’71, which paved the way towards stem cell research in that state (Haran et al. 2008, 57). 16 Michael Tavel Clarke (2008) points out that DeVito’s performance as a street-smart wise-guy echoes Richard Pryor’s performance opposite Gene Wilder in Silver Streak (1976). 17 The judge who is tasked with clearing up the mess and who punishes both twins because he cannot tell them apart (Smith 2000, 448) is a clear nod to the courtroom finale of What’s up, Doc? (1972), Peter Bogdanovich’s quintessential screen farce. 18 In Bangladesh, Magid survives a tornado at the exact same moment as when Millat has unprotected sex without catching his partner’s STD (Smith 2000, 183).

Works Cited Primary Texts Amis, Martin (1991/2003). Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence. London: Vintage. Atwood, Margaret (1985/2017). The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage. Boyne, John (2006). The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. London: Random House. Burnside, John (1997/2015). The Dumb House. London: Vintage.

Multiplying Twins  217 Dickens, Charles (1870/2002). The Mystery of Edwin Drood. London: Penguin. Follett, Ken (1996/2014). The Third Twin. New York: Ballantine. Grangé, Jean-Christophe (1997/2016). Blood-Red Rivers. Trans. Ian Monk. London: Vintage. Huxley, Aldous (1932/1994). Brave New World. London: Flamingo. Ishiguro, Kazuo (2005). Never Let Me Go. London: faber & faber. Konar, Affinity (2016). Mischling. London: Atlantic. Levin, Ira (1976). The Boys from Brazil. New York: Dell. Lowry, Lois (1993). The Giver. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin. Nabokov, Vladimir (1965). Despair. New York: G.P. Putnam. Phillips, Marie (2019). Oh, I Do Like to Be … London: Unbound. Priest, Christopher (1995/2011). The Prestige. New York: Tor. Smith, Zadie (2000). White Teeth. New York: Vintage. Swift, Graham (2007). Tomorrow. London: Picador.

Other Media Dawn of the Dead (1978). Dir. George A. Romero. United Film. Junior (1994). Dir. Ivan Reitman. Universal. Jurassic Park (1993). Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal. Jurassic World (2015). Dir. Colin Trevorrow. Universal. The 6th Day (2000). Dir. Roger Spottiswoode. Columbia. The Boys from Brazil (1978). Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. Fox. The Prestige (2006). Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner. Twins (1988). Dir. Ivan Reitman. Universal. What Happened to Monday (2017). Dir. Tommy Wirkola. Netflix. What’s up, Doc? (1972). Dir. Peter Bogdanovich. Warner.

Secondary Texts Adams, Mark B., Garland E. Allen, and Sheila Faith Weiss (2005). “Human Heredity and Politics.” Osiris 20: 232–262. Agamben, Giorgio (1995/1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP. Alford, John R., and John R. Hibbing (2008). “The New Empirical Biopolitics.” Annual Review of Political Science 11.1: 183–203. Anon. (2012). “Ouroboros, the Infinity Symbol.” Mythologian, http://­mythologian. net/ouroboros-symbol-of-infinity/. Aristotle (1943). Generation of Animals. Trans. A.L. Peck. London: Heinemann. Baudrillard, Jean (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Baudrillard, Jean (1990). “The ‘Ludic’ and Cold Seduction.” Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s P, 157–178. Baudrillard, Jean (1993). The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London/New York: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean (1997/2002). “The Clone or the Degree Xerox of the Species.” Screened Out. Trans. Chris Turner. London/New York: Verso, 196–202. Bhabha, Homi K. (2004). The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge.

218  Multiplying Twins Black, Edwin (2004). War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Braidotti, Rosi (2012). “Transposing Life.” Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of Replication. Eds. Philomena Essed and Gabriele Schwab. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 61–78. Claeys, Gregory (2010). “The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell.” The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Ed. Gregory Claeys. Cambridge: CUP, 107–131. Clarke, Michael Tavel (2008). “Danny DeVito’s Body.” Genders, www.colorado. edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/2008/03/01/danny-devitos-body. Cohen, Daniel (2002). Cloning. Brookfield: Millbrook. Crew, Hilary S. (2004). “Not So Brave a World: The Representation of Human Cloning in Science Fiction for Young Adults.” The Lion and the Unicorn 28.2: 203–221. Dawson, Ashley (2007). Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Deleuze, Gilles (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Charles Stivale and Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP. Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Roudinesco (2004). For What Tomorrow …: A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford UP. Ferreira, Maria Aline (2005). I Am the Other: Literary Negotiations of Human Cloning. Westport/London: Praeger. Foucault, Michel (2004). “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Trans. David Macey. London: Penguin. Greven, David (2017). Queering the Terminator: Sexuality and Cyborg Cinema. London: Bloomsbury. Haran, Joan, Jenny Kitzinger, Maureen McNeil, and Kate O’Riordan (2008). Human Cloning in the Media: From Science Fiction to Science Practice. ­L ondon/New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_ Meets_OnceMouseTM : Feminism and Technoscience. London/New York: Routledge. Harris, John (2004). On Cloning. London/New York: Routledge. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn (2010). Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Huggan, Graham (2010). “Is the ‘Post’ in ‘Postsecular’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postcolonial’?” Modern Fiction Studies 56.4: 751–768. Kor, Eva Mozes (1995). Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr. Mengele’s Twins. Terre Haute: Candles. Kuhlman, Martha (2004). “The Uncanny Clone: The X-Files, Popular Culture, and Cloning.” Studies in Popular Culture 26.3: 75–87. Lash, John (1993). Twins and the Double. London: Thames & Hudson. Lifton, Robert Jay (1986). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Lotze, Reinhold (1937). Zwillinge. Oehringen: Rau. Marks, John (2010). “Clone Stories: ‘Shallow Are the Souls that Have Forgotten How to Shudder’.” Paragraph 33.3: 331–353. Nerlich, Brigitte, David D. Clarke, and Robert Dingwall (2001). “Fictions, Fantasies, and Fears: The Literary Foundations of the Cloning Debate.” Journal of Literary Semantics 30: 37–52.

Multiplying Twins  219 O’Riordan, Kate (2008). “Genomic Science in Contemporary Film: Institutions, Individuals and Genre.” Cinema and Technology. Eds. Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau, and Adrian Mackenzie. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 105–123. Olson, Jonathan R. (2015). “Nolan’s Immersive Allegories of Filmmaking in Inception and The Prestige.” The Cinema of Christopher Nolan. Eds. Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy. New York/Chichester: Columbia UP, 44–61. Peller, Scott (2008). “Laboring for a Brave New World: Our Ford and the Epsilons.” Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’: Essays. Eds. David Garrett Izzo and Kim Kirkpatrick. Jefferson: McFarland, 62–72. Prosono, Marvin T. (2008). “Fascism of the Skin: Symptoms of Alienation in the Body of Consumptive Capitalism.” Current Sociology 56.4: 635–656. Ramet, Carlos (2015). Ken Follett and the Triumph of Suspense. Jefferson: McFarland. Ramos, Iolanda (2013). “Performing Illusions: Neo-Victorianism, Utopianism, and Cultural (De)Constructions.” Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging. Eds. Teresa Botelho and Iolanda Ramos. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 110–127. Rastogi, Pallavi (2016). “Women’s Fiction and Literary (Self-)Determination.” The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945– 2010). Ed. Deirdre Osborne. Cambridge: CUP, 77–94. Saunders, Dave (2009). Arnold: Schwarzenegger and the Movies. London/New York: I.B. Tauris. Schmuhl, Hans-Walter (2008). The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945: Crossing Boundaries. ­Dordrecht: Springer. Schwab, Gabriele (2012). “Replacement Humans.” Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of Replication. Eds. Philomena Essed and Gabriele Schwab. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 79–93. Schwartz, Hillel (1996). The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books. Segal, Nancy L. (2017). Twin Mythconceptions: False Beliefs, Fables, and Facts about Twins. London: Academic. Seymour, David M. (2013). “The Purgatory of the Camp: Political Emancipation and the Emancipation of the Political.” Giorgio Agamben: Legal, ­Political and Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. Tom Frost. London/New York: Routledge, 97–118. Somit, Albert, and Steven A. Peterson (2011). “Introduction.” Biology and Politics: The Cutting Edge. Eds. Steven A. Peterson and Albert Somit. Bingley: Emerald, 3–8. Stableford, Brian J. (2006). Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. London/New York: Routledge. Stolcke, Verena (2012). “Homo Clonicus.” Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of Replication. Eds. Philomena Essed and Gabriele Schwab. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 25–43. Tembo, Kwasu David (2015). “On the Work of the Double in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige.” The Cinema of Christopher Nolan. Eds. Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy. New York/Chichester: Columbia UP, 201–218. Tew, Philip (2010). Zadie Smith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Turda, Marius (2010). Modernism and Eugenics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

220  Multiplying Twins Verschuer, Otmar Frhr. von (1939). “Twin Research from the Time of Francis Galton to the Present-Day.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 128.850: 62–81. Verschuer, Otmar Frhr. von (1966). Eugenik. Witten: Luther. Vice, Sue (2000). Holocaust Fiction. London/New York: Routledge. Wasson, Sara (2011). “‘A Butcher’s Shop Where the Meat Still Moved’: Gothic Doubles, Organ Harvesting and Human Cloning.” Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010. Eds. Sara Wasson and Emily Alder. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 73–86. Weiss, Sheila Faith (2010). “After the Fall: Political Whitewashing, Professional Posturing, and Personal Refashioning in the Postwar Career of Otmar Freiheer von Verschuer.” Isis 101.4: 722–758. Williams, Linda Ruth (2012). “Arnold Schwarzenegger: Corporeal Charisma.” Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s. Ed. Anna Everett. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 19–42. Wulff, Hans J. (2005). “Die entmachtete Sexualität: Politik, Klonieren und Replikation im neueren Kino.” Unheimlich anders: Doppelgänger, Monster, Schattenwesen im Kino. Eds. Christine Rüffert, Irmbert Schenk, Karl H. Schmid, and Alfred Tews. Berlin: Bertz+Fischer, 141–152. Žižek, Slavoj (2009). “No Sex, Please, We’re Post-Human.” Lacan Dot Com, www.lacan.com/nosex.htm.

7 Untangling Twins

After the emphatic way in which Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) summarises the history and biopolitics of twinship while also looking ahead, there can be but a brief coda to scrutinise the implications of said happy ending. I set out by claiming that twinship is not to be conflated with some of its close affiliates, particularly the literary double. It has often been relegated to the latter, as a kind of fundamentally disposable, comic prologue in the run-up to the nineteenth-century’s complex forays into the realm of duality and the uncanny. On the basis of the four major case studies which constitute the bulk of this book, it is safe to conclude that the twin motif arguably performs things that the literary double is not capable of. Admittedly, a not inconsiderable number of literary texts often partake in ‘incidental twin’ syndrome, employing twinship as a gimmick and as a popular though somewhat predictable and inconsequential trope that indicates “overly familiar plots and imitative productions” (de Nooy 2005, 157). Yet it would be a gross simplification to assume that twinship is always limited to this role as a startling ingredient to ‘spice up’ otherwise conventional and generic literary texts. Initially, I also put forward the hypothesis that there is not just one characteristic manifestation of twinship within the confines of a particular genre or literary paradigm, and not just one semantic operation that comprehensively sums up twinship in all its literary contexts. While each of the case studies was organised around one such operation, the structure has inevitably produced some degree of overlap between the individual chapters. Frequently, a ‘twin moment’ will find unlikely intertextual echoes in a different historic and generic context, as different explorations of twinship draw upon similar rhetorical devices, tropes, and sense-making operations. The textual effects that twinship creates across more than four centuries of literary production clearly resonate with one another, and in putting forward this typology, there is no point in pretending they can always be clearly delineated from one another: farce ignites laughter, of course, but at the same time, it toys with the horrific effects of the uncanny, and in its structural set-up, it also employs a self-inflicted striptease logic of revealing and disclosing that is usually associated with the realm of the erotic, as farce oscillates between the

222  Untangling Twins frenzy of arousal and the danger of exposure and humiliation. By contrast, the genre of detective fiction, in its attempts to establish truth and to serve (poetic) justice, aims no less at producing unambiguous results than the comedies of mistaken identity whose climactic family reunions are so intent upon matchmaking and sorting out the ‘natural’ order of kinship systems. A similar case can be made for the topical overlap across the literary continuum in the four individual case studies, which once again reaffirms that the anxieties and ‘discontents of civilisation’ (Freud) that become manifest in discussions of twinship are never fully resolved, and the simple fact that it takes twins to put those fears on the table confirms that they are not just a footnote to allegedly more complex doppelganger narratives. Most of all, this concerns kinship troubles and dynastic conflicts, both of which take centre stage in narratives organised around blood relations and incest troubles, the conflict between nature and nurture, and the suspicion of supernatural or divine interference that harks back all the way to mythical pre-texts. I have tried to fully accommodate this thematic scope in my choice of material, while at the same time shining a light on one of the many neglected aspects of literary twinship: its key role in performing a kind of historic midwife service to literature. Arguably, twinship has played a significant role for the inception of literary genres, but also for the paradigms of appropriation and citation that characterise the field of adaptation. The midwife metaphor should not be over-stretched, however, as the inception of those paradigms is, in itself, a twinned operation, and one that is reminiscent of the process of cell division. This kind of splitting is crucial to the cultural work of meaning-making, which is borne out by various creation myths that suggest that the binaries of darkness/ light or heaven/earth have emerged from divine twin constellations. At the same time, the split signifies a structural operation and introduces the possibility of ambiguity, a feature that not only characterises literature in general but also haunts most of the texts examined here. On the whole, this ambiguity is hard to catch up with: once the lid has been opened, twinship cannot to be contained anymore, and that which is two or ‘divided’ struggles forever to become one again, ‘in-dividual’ – even if it attempts to do so via the semantic operations examined here. My aim to characterise the fundamentally twinned nature of literary production and meaning-making has determined the outline of this book: rejecting the idea of writing a concise literary history of twinship, while at the same time accommodating the historic developments and investigating literary production as a major discursive force and in terms of its epistemological role. Of course, this does not mean that literary texts should be seen as merely ‘reflecting’ social forces and historic circumstance, but rather that they actively partake in the formation of these socio-historic contexts and in facilitating epistemic change, for instance,

Untangling Twins  223 by giving a stage to ritualised exorcisms of collective fears. This is most evident in the Victorian discourse on criminology and eugenics, where twinship emerges as a key category in order to separate guilty criminals from innocent bystanders and the exoticised, colonial Other from the allegedly safe realm of the domestic. Stephen Greenblatt’s belief in the traceability of a force as elusive as ‘social energy’ may be too esoteric for some tastes, yet there is value in his observation that “history cannot simply be set against literary texts as either stable antithesis or stable background” (1988, 95), and that the two must rather be seen as working together. I have thus attempted to discuss my literary sources in conjunction with other text-types, particularly medical and scientific treatises. Inevitably, these sources bear testimony to a number of contradictory beliefs regarding ideas of reproduction, the (mis-)conception of twins, and the power of genetics. Both a Shakespeare play about uncanny twin births and the medical treatises of his time use twinship to articulate and negotiate concerns and anxieties regarding reproduction and dynastic continuity. In the Elizabethan age, drama emerged as a genre particularly well-suited to this purpose, what with its characteristic lack of a privileged authorial view-point allowing for the negotiation of fiercely contested positions, while the (pseudo-)scientific qualities of nineteenth-century genre fiction lent itself naturally to the epistemological debates of the Victorian era, particularly since the stage had by then acquired a rather different function. On top of this, the individual case studies have demonstrated how twinship, in different historic eras, was instrumentalised in order to work through pressing issues of the day, including philosophical conundrums triggered by major shifts in the history of thought, identity crises which are felt both on the individual and the collective levels, the rising middle-class’s fears surrounding criminality, and unacknowledged worries regarding the future of the species and the nature of reproduction. If the case studies have, for the most part, limited themselves to the context of British literature and culture, this does not mean that my observations only hold true for this narrow framework. In fact, it has been one of the aims of this book to challenge existing claims regarding the distribution and semantisation of the twin motif across territorial borders. German literature knows its fair share of twins, but they tend to be overshadowed by the infinitely more prominent double, for instance, in the age of romanticism. I would therefore like to encourage scholars working in different fields to challenge existing assumptions regarding literary twinship, to unearth the motif’s rich history, and to reassess it without getting caught up in debates about much-maligned genre labels. I have attempted to strike a balance between the literary canon, on the one hand, and marginalised texts and genres, on the other. It is my hope that, by drawing the reader’s attention to the rich family trees spawned by key tales of twinship like The Comedy of Errors (1594) or The Notting

224  Untangling Twins Hill Mystery (1865), I have done justice both to the micro-level of close reading and to the macro-level of the larger literary context. Probing the depth structure of challenging and, so far, neglected material is at least as important as having an eye on the bigger picture and on developments across the historical continuum, in the spirit of Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading,’ where distance is “not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge” (Moretti 2007, 1). Several patterns have emerged over several centuries of literary production: not only can one find clusters of literary texts addressing twinship at specific moments in time where discursive fields reconstitute themselves and reinvent categories of knowledge (which provokes shifts in the field of literature, too), but there is also a pattern here of marginalising twin tales in favour of allegedly more nuanced takes on dualism. Shakespeare criticism is usually happy to drop the two Antipholi in favour of King Lear’s Edmund/Edgar pairing, not unlike how Dickens’s Landless twins have inspired much less scholarly work than John Jasper’s drug-­ induced personality split in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). This brings us back once more to the vicious circle of scholarly assessments of twinship: texts have often fallen outside the jurisdiction of literary criticism because they featured twins and because they were associated with allegedly inferior genres, but as long as nobody presented a strong case to change this state of affairs, existing assumptions regarding twinship remained unchallenged.

Twincest Fantasies If there is one thing that all those long-lost and newly found twins have in common, no matter if they are murderous or harmony-loving, mischievous or benevolent, it is their pronounced urge to rush off-stage as soon as the curtain has fallen in order to get down to the nitty-gritty of reproduction, that is: to be fruitful and multiply once the plot-imposed threat of multiplication has been averted. This is as true for Shakespeare’s characters as it is for the absolved suspects of early detective narratives or the bystanders of the twentieth century’s clone thrillers. Judging from the way in which so many tales of twinship bow to convention and accept the somewhat sanitised boredom of the conventional marriage plot, one could assume that they all tiptoe around the idea of tackling sexuality head-on, but this is not true. There is the blossoming field of twin pornography, which excels at filling in the blanks of what has to remain off-stage in Shakespearean drama and the Victorian novel. The most popular scenario sees a nontwinned subject, whose privileged point of view is offered as the primary means of identification for the reader/viewer, engage in a threesome with complete identicals. This male-dominated fantasy of excess is infused with subliminal incestuous fantasies as much as with capitalist

Untangling Twins  225 logic of the ‘greed is good’ variety, “sponsored by a commercial faith that consuming should be a passion, as it must have been in the womb” (Schwartz 1996, 42). Outside the realm of myth, it finds one of its earliest manifestations in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1353), in the story of King Carlo who falls under the spell of a knight’s angelic twin daughters when they serve him a hearty meal, still dripping from the water of the pool where they have fished: “he did not know which of the two he liked best, so much did they resemble each other” (514). In Boccaccio, the consummation of (forbidden) fruit acts as an emblem of erotic consummation and of the king taking what is ‘rightfully’ his; it is only when he is scolded by his advisor that he decides not to abduct Ginevra and Isotta, exhibiting restraint in the face of twofold seduction. Erotic twin fantasies continue throughout literary history: somewhat transcendental (though never completely disembodied) in Thomas Mann’s fin-de-siècle novellas, more carnal in genre fiction that enacts fantasies of complete passivity, like Eve Singer’s Twin Bonds series (2015), a trilogy of short fiction that vaguely follows the anti-feminist trajectory of the bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey series. Popular culture has turned this scenario into a staple, to the point of it becoming a throwaway joke. Donald Westlake’s narrator in Two Much (1975) gets himself caught up in a farcical mess because “I’d suddenly realized I’d always wanted to fuck twins” (36), while Austin Powers can cross one item off his bucket list after his encounter with Japanese twins ‘Fook Mi’ and ‘Fook Yu’ (Fig. 7.1). No matter what the constellation, though, the scenario usually allows for a brief, carnivalesque interlude of wish-fulfilment, and it also affords

Fig. 7.1  Austin Powers and his twin fantasy (Austin Powers in Goldmember).

226  Untangling Twins a tentative articulation of more illicit, incestuous desires. Doniger claims that “the competition between twins in the womb” resonates with “the competition between two women in bed” (2000, 71), which may be the reason why twin erotica and other items in popular culture flirt with the idea of incest without fully subscribing to it. One of the most controversial scenes in the Star Wars trilogy occurs in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), when Princess Leia gives Luke Skywalker a passionate kiss that seems to put Luke in a state of post-coital bliss. It was not before the next instalment that fans learned that Luke and Leia were, in fact, twin siblings. Pornographic literature tends to favour a rather passive, non-twinned narrator. The first volume in Singer’s trilogy is called Taken by My Twin Stepbrothers, and it not only leaves the majority of the ‘taking,’ ‘gripping,’ ‘pounding,’ and ‘thrusting’ to the twins, it also sets up its orgiastic centrepiece by way of a slightly convoluted background story in order to make it safe for the narrator to offer her body as a site of exchange. Her two lovers may be twins, but at least they are not blood relations to her, and if this is a coy way of committing incest ‘by proxy’ and of suggesting that it only requires the presence of a vagina to make intercourse between two brothers acceptable, the conceit is no more outrageous than the famous proposal in John Donne’s The Flea (1633), where the speaker asks for intercourse because the lovers’ blood has already mingled in the insect. Fully fledged ‘twincest’ pornography goes beyond teasing, and it has propelled the unlikely careers of performers like the ‘Porcelain Twinz’ or the Peters brothers (see Rogers 2010). As pornography is wont to cater to all tastes, the Peters brothers are no isolated phenomenon; they are the figureheads of what is a brimming subgenre these days. Pornography is no less in need of narrative currency than farce or detective fiction, and twins rise to the occasion the same way they do when acting as signifiers of confusion or as red herrings. Not that the rhetoric is so fundamentally different: Schwartz, in arguing that “repetition is the gospel of pornography”, clearly has an eye on Bergson’s comic strategies when he puns that “the truth of the Passion is in the Second Coming” (1996, 306). Popular culture laps up what it can in order to keep its inventory wellstocked, and if twin erotica do not arouse everyone in terms of sex, at least they arouse curiosity, which accounts for yet another example of ‘incidental twin’ syndrome. In a saturated media environment, twins are a trusted ingredient to spice up a tasteless dish – when the ratings of Big Brother began to dwindle, the producers, in an attempt to attract viewers with new gimmicks, took to casting twins as participants in the hope of sparking some farcical situation humour, as well as amorous complications. It may not exactly be art imitating life, but it certainly manages to exploit the headline-grabbing qualities of twinship, albeit in a manner that has ‘freak show’ written all over it.1 This is no less

Untangling Twins  227 true when it comes to accounts of conjoined twins, details of whose sex lives have been handed down in anthropological reports (Doniger 2000, 464–465). The set-up is played for laughs in a film like Stuck on You (2003), where the conjoined twins use a curtain to give each other privacy during sex, and for sheer body horror in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988). The latter’s pièce de resistance comes when one of the twin gynaecologists is in bed with his lover and dreams that he is conjoined with his brother. The sequence commences like run-of-themill twin erotica but takes a grotesque turn when Beverly’s girlfriend starts to gnaw at their Siamese connection (Fig. 7.2), a twist that sends Cronenberg’s relatively restrained film down the path of abjection and cannibalism (de Nooy 2005, 79). Fantasies of ‘twincest’ have been around for a long time, and they permeate the brimming field of fan-made slash fiction that is spawned by franchises like Harry Potter. In the Potter universe, fan-made stories about the carnal activities of the Patil twins or the Weasleys posit incest as something queer and amicable rather than exclusively heterosexual and violent (Cuntz-Leng 2015, 179). ‘Twincest’ is often bound up with the figure of the embracing twins that has made several appearances throughout this book: the siblings who interlock in utero, a gesture that has been read as one of affection and of desperation, so that the threat of violent outburst is never far off. The respective imagery haunts Cronenberg’s film, too, not just in the nightmarish threesome but also in the film’s credit sequence, which makes extensive use of material from historic midwife manuals. Once again, the image of entangled twins brings

Fig. 7.2  T he ‘twincest’ dream runs amok (Dead Ringers).

228  Untangling Twins us back to the Ouroboros, the snake attempting to swallow its own tail and the symbol of the infinite renewal of time (see Assmann 2017). In The Prestige (1995), it not only characterises the relationship between the two magicians who spend their lives locked in combat and grudging admiration for each other, but also the filial struggle between the Borden twins, who are haunted by the ampersand: a connective that serves, rather paradoxically, as a signifier of difference. The ‘dangerous proximity’ of the incestuous narratives that haunt the cultural history of twinship cannot be easily dismissed, particularly because it resonates with the idea of cell division as explored by Baudrillard: “a copulation between One and the Same unmediated by the Other”, or: “still incest, but without the tragedy” (Baudrillard 1993, 121). Literary treatments of ‘twincest’ cannot evade the tragic script, though; Gilbert Adair’s The Dreamers (1988) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) are cases in point. Both emphasise the strength of the twin bond in sexually charged diction: to his sister Rahel, Estha is “a naked stranger” whom she once met “in a chance encounter” and who later “led her (swimming) through their lovely mother’s cunt” (Roy 1997, 93), while in Adair’s novel, Isabelle informs Matthew that it literally was “love at first sight” between her and her twin brother (Adair 1988/2004, 116). Both novels narrate their stories of twinship as tragic tales of innocence irretrievably lost. When observing the sleeping Théo and Isabelle, Matthew is intrigued by how they have become habitually intertwined: “the limbs of one seemed also to belong to the other”, and the “entanglement of bodies” presents him with “the enigma of the Androgyne” (ibid. 68). The ancient and powerful idea that the twins are busy fondling each other’s sexless bodies even before they are born, confined as they may be by their spatial surroundings, is reinforced elsewhere, too. Michel Tournier’s Gemini (1975) deliberately juxtaposes the twin bond of Jean/ Paul with Alexandre’s homosexuality, and the novel seems to get a particular kick out of toying with some of the worst clichés about gay identity formation in the process, including the age-old prejudice that both homosexuality and incest allegedly feature more frequently amongst male identical twins (see Bixler 1983). The novel not only features the sodomising of animals, Oedipal fixation, narcissism, and sewer animals, it also has Paul ponder homosexuality as “the facsimile of twinship among non-twins” (Tournier 1975/1998, 298), one of a number of passages that make Gemini and its sexual politics rather controversial. The novel’s stance on twinship is much more substantial, however, for Gemini is a truly incestuous novel in terms of its structure: it does not feature many plot events and border-crossings in the traditional sense, and its characters are quite content to remain within their geminate bubble. While the plot comes to a virtual standstill as Paul approaches his cosmological fusion with Jean, the narration withdraws into increasingly self-contained

Untangling Twins  229 reflections, to mirror the twinned experience. Jean/Paul cannot help but mourn the loss of their “autonomous cell” once it has been “dropped into a world which we call twinless” (330), and by granting his météores a return to the c­ osmic sphere, Tournier acknowledges the ideal of the ­“eternal pair, united in a perpetual loving embrace” (143). Throughout the literary history of twinship, this constellation can be read as both an emblem of complete corruption and as the epitome of innocence. In The Dreamers, Isabelle thinks of herself as a virgin “because she had never made love except to her brother” (Adair 1988/2004, 110), a view that inevitably clashes with the accepted notions of taboo. Frequently, ‘twincest’ narratives yearn for a return to a time before the firm establishment of the culturally constitutive binaries and before the incest taboo – the time before “the Love Laws were made”, as The God of Small Things would have it, “laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much” (Roy 1997, 33). Roy’s book is another one to feature two tragically entangled twins, and in this respect, it does not differ greatly from other twin narratives in which a traumatic event forcefully ejects the siblings from the paradise of infancy. It is the accidental death of their cousin Sophie, as well as “what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies” that leads Rahel to think of her brother and herself no longer “together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us” but as “Them” (ibid. 2–3).2 The narrative makes a point of stressing that Rahel and Estha’s blissful childhood union is an extension of their symbiosis in the womb: the description of the newly born babies is one of “twin seals” who are “slick with their mother’s juices” (40), while their secret form of communication is located outside the accepted symbolic order. Their secret language leads teachers and missionaries to see “Satan in their eyes” (60), though it is simply based on spelling words backwards. After the traumatic split, language and shame suddenly work to separate rather than unite the twins, as Estha is rendered speechless and locks out the world, Rahel included. When meeting again after years of separation, the twins commit incest in a futile attempt to exorcise their traumatic history and to return to that state where they had “known each other before Life began” (327). By invoking the very same prenatal realm which exists as a kind of spiritual otherworld in a number of transcultural twin narratives, Roy’s novel makes a point of going back to “those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun” (2); however, where Buchi Emecheta (Kehinde, 1994) or Diana Evans (26a, 2005) utilise twinship to put their protagonists in touch with their roots, Roy’s twin narrative goes back even further, to the moment before civilisation (see Satpathy 1999). Incest thus functions as a means of rebelling “against the strictures on identity enforced by family and history” (Eldred 2005, 75), which resonates not only with Talcott Parsons’ take on incest but also with Roy’s passionate postcolonial stance.

230  Untangling Twins It is a futile rebellion, though: Estha only sleeps with his sister in order to recapture their mother, a gesture that seems tailor-made for the citational figure of twinship itself. Yet by presenting a case for ‘twincest’ as a particularly pure form of love that exudes our grasp of signification, these novelists simultaneously suggest that all love carries overtones of the Platonic ideal of a perfect but lost symbiosis. Watching a young flirtatious couple dressed rather alike, Adair’s narrator is reminded of “Siamese twins joined at the lips” (1988/2004, 20), and the concluding tableau of The God of Small Things does not show the incestuous twins but their mother sharing a secret embrace with her lover Velutha, an ‘untouchable.’ Their seclusion evokes that of the twins as Velutha draws “[Ammu’s] hair round them like a tent. Like her children did when they wanted to exclude the outside world” (Roy 1997, 336). The incest argument can thus be easily inverted, for does the heterosexual union between lovers, star-crossed as they may be in this example, not strive for the fully twinned dissolution of one within the other, much more than the ‘twincest’ scenario strives for an approximation of the former? In The Dreamers, Matthew muses that, from the perspective of the child, mother and father sleeping together appears no less incestuous than what Isabelle and Théo get up to (Adair 1988/2004, 117), and he willingly allows himself to become adopted by the two, “a child for their incestuous cradle” (91). The twin-parent continuum features equally prominently in Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (1982), where Lewis and Benjamin take to sleeping in their parents’ bed when they inherit the farm from them, and they continue to regress into the confined space of their property. Viewed like this, ‘parental’ spells ‘prenatal,’ and the anagrammatic permutation serves as another Ouroboros-like entanglement of infinite deferral. No wonder that twins may be the only ones who feel naturally at home in the labyrinthine environment of the dictionary, where one reference only ever yields the next. For the unschooled Lenny, one of the twins in Linda Grant’s The Dark Circle (2016), a dictionary embodies the very idea of “get[ting] on in life,” while his fellow patient Valerie can only see the encyclopaedic equivalent of “the Keystone cops, clumsy, ineffective types who are always falling over themselves running after words that are so much quicker and cleverer and adaptable and more cunning” (203).

(Tw)in the Loop The regressive structure of The God of Small Things is borne out by a discursive arrangement wholly appropriate to the notion of trauma, which goes back and forth in time and repeatedly loops around its key tragic events, with past and present permanently interlocked in a violent struggle that none of the protagonists successfully escapes. This aspect of the intra-uterine entanglement should not be overlooked: where the

Untangling Twins  231 twins embrace, they are also on the verge of suffocating each other. In Adaptation (2002), Charlie Kaufman feels drawn to the image of the snake swallowing its own tail and thus implicitly acknowledges not just the futility of his self-proclaimed ideal of creative autonomy, but also an almost cannibalistic urge that can only produce an infinite loop within the film’s self-conscious mise-en-abyme structure. Kaufman is not the only twin who finds himself drawn to the loop. Its tautological character recommends it as the definitive emblem of twinship, for the very reason that it proves impossible to untangle. In addition to carrying strong overtones of the Ouroboros and the ampersand (the connective tissue suggesting twinship in The Prestige), it hints at the circular movement that is performed in so many twin tales, including farce with its repetitive frenzy. The Comedy of Errors not only ends where it started, it also sees two pairs of twins circling each other for the better part of five acts. Each of their movements serves, paradoxically, as a rapprochement that simultaneously keeps the other one at a distance, with every exit to the right provoking another entry from the left. There is no possibility of escape until the game has exhausted all of its possible combinations. Endless looping abounds elsewhere, too. Kelly Link’s The Specialist’s Hat (1998), a Gothic horror tale that is as indebted to nineteenth-­ century tropes as The Prestige, includes a reflection on the circular typographic sign as emblematic of the twinned condition. Samantha, one of the ghostly twins in the story, ponders how “the number 8 […] can be more than one thing at once”, for when you “lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth” (69). Unbeknownst to herself, Samantha has stumbled not only on a visual equivalent of the various lexematic near-identicals which recur throughout the story (“grey”/“gray”, “being Dead”/“being dead”), but also on the mathematical infinity symbol, which proves eerily appropriate to her own fate, as she and her twin sister are doomed to be “stuck indefinitely between ten and eleven years old” (68) and to perform the infinite deferral indicated in her numerical observation. There is no end to the loop. Thomson & Thompson, Hergé’s dim-­ witted pseudo-twins whom I have already cited in Chapter 1, perform it in a manner that raises it to a textual operation. In Tintin au pays de l’or noir (Land of Black Gold, 1950), the two detectives get lost in the desert and accidentally drive in a loop, which means they end up following their own tracks ad infinitum (Fig. 7.3). By failing to identify the source of the tracks, the twinned detectives fall victim to twinship themselves, as they are doomed to remain permanently stuck on a journey that renders all their hermeneutic efforts futile. According to Tom McCarthy, it is a “brilliantly allegorical” and “endlessly regressive [scene]: what Thompson and Thomson are doing is failing to recognise that they are not only reading their own mark but also reading their own reading of their mark, their interpretation of their own interpretation” (2008, 24).

232  Untangling Twins

Fig. 7.3  T homson & Thompson in the loop (Hergé 1950/1977, 29).

McCarthy is not the only novelist to adapt the infinite loop into his own fiction3; it also features in On the Black Hill, where the Jones twins are presented with an aeroplane flight for their 80th birthday, and when Lewis is allowed to fly a few manoeuvres himself, he writes “the figures eight and zero in the sky” (Chatwin 1982/1998, 254). Pondering the results of this study, I find myself drawn to the Tintin episode more than to any other, and I must acknowledge its undeniable implications: by tracing twinned tracks throughout several centuries of literary history, I may have ended up stumbling upon marks which noone (or maybe: no-two) but myself left in the landscape, and my tracking devices may have, in turn, produced more tracks for me to find, rather than unearth and scrutinise the ones that were there to begin with – if indeed there were any. Like Thomson & Thompson, I may have ended up proving that it is possible to move in a loop without ever being ‘in the loop,’ that is: in the know. But I am not so sure one can separate the two tracking processes at all. In fact, my analyses have repeatedly suggested that the sense-making operations of textual production and of reading are twinned procedures to begin with, and if this is a process that requires the double mark of ‘leaving tracks’ and ‘tracing tracks’ to be r­ epeated ad nauseam, then so be it. From the urge to detect differences and to establish a binary order emerges meaning, and my own twinned analysis of this twinned procedure is not likely to be an exception to the rule. Doniger, in her study of the bed-trick, not only stresses the special role that all forms of doubling play in our epistemic quest of “ ­ making sense out of the chaos of experience” (2000, 6), she also asks herself whether the recurrence of a motif inevitably produces ‘sameness’ in texts. However, she quite legitimately reasons that one would “fall victim to a texttrick” were one to assume “that two stories with the same basic plot will make the same point about that plot” (10). Isabelle, one of the incestuous twins in The Dreamers, counters an allegation to that effect: angered by Matthew’s canine devotion to her and Théo, she snaps at him that complete agreement between two people usually “means one of them is redundant” (Adair 1988/2004, 14). So in spite of all the reasonable

Untangling Twins  233 qualms about the tautological nature of twinned representations and the likelihood of a Thomson/Thompson-like folly with regard to methodology, I remain convinced of the absolute necessity of this twinned intervention. A violent disruption of twinned entanglements – and a critical analysis of the relevant literature certainly counts to that effect – must necessarily produce meaning, but once the split has occurred, there can be no going back, neither to the twinned symbiosis of the original cell nor to a perspective that pretends there never was a split to begin with. In other words: once you have grasped twinship, you can never not see it again.

Notes 1 The sex lives of twins feature far less frequently in ‘highbrow’ fiction. In Grant’s The Dark Circle (2016), Miriam is discreet enough to leave the room “when she knew [her brother] wanted a wank” (49). 2 Confused pronouns abound throughout the history of literary twinship. In Gemini, Jean/Paul “never heard anything but vous, because the fusion of the twins never reached the point of people regarding them as a single individual” (Tournier 1975/1998, 324). 3 McCarthy, who excels at incorporating poststructuralist theory into his own literary works, writes the loop into the conclusion of Remainder (2005). The book’s nameless protagonist performs elaborately staged re-enactments of past events, and the ending sees him hire an aeroplane to fly loops until the fuel runs out: “Our trail would be visible from the ground: an eight” (283).

Works Cited Primary Texts Adair, Gilbert (1988/2004). The Dreamers. London: faber & faber. Boccaccio, Giovanni (1353/1949). The Decameron. Trans. Richard Aldington. New York: Garden City. Chatwin, Bruce (1982/1998). On the Black Hill. London: Vintage. Donne, John (1633/2006). “The Flea.” Metaphysical Poetry. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Penguin, 4–5. Grant, Linda (2016). The Dark Circle. London: Virago. Hergé (1950/1977). Land of Black Gold. Trans. Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. New York: Little, Brown & Co. Link, Kelly (1998/2001). “The Specialist’s Hat.” Stranger Things Happen. Northampton: Small Beer, 55–70. McCarthy, Tom (2005/2010). Remainder. Richmond: Alma Books. Roy, Arundhati (1997). The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo. Schwartz, Hillel (1996). The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books. Singer, Eve (2015). Taken by My Twin Stepbrothers. n.p.: Smutpire. Smith, Zadie (2000). White Teeth. New York: Vintage. Tournier, Michel (1975/1998). Gemini. Trans. Anne Carter. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP. Westlake, Donald E. (1975). Two Much. Greenwich: Fawcett Crest.

234  Untangling Twins Other Media Adaptation (2002). Dir. Spike Jonze. Sony. Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002). Dir. Jay Roach. Warner. Dead Ringers (1988). Dir. David Cronenberg. Fox. Stuck on You (2003). Dir. Peter & Bobby Farrelly. Fox. The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Dir. Irvin Kershner. Fox.

Secondary Texts Assmann, Jan (2017). “Ouroboros: Der altägyptische Mythos vom Sonnenlauf.” Never Ending Stories: Der Loop in Kunst, Film, Architektur, Musik, Literatur und Kunstgeschichte. Ed. Ralf Beil. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 58–63. Baudrillard, Jean (1993). The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London/New York: Verso. Bixler, Ray H. (1983). “Homosexual Twin Incest Avoidance.” The Journal of Sex Research 19.3: 296–302. Cuntz-Leng, Vera (2015). Harry Potter Que(e)r: Eine Filmsaga im Spannungsfeld von Queer Reading, Slash Fandom und Fantasyfilmgenre. Bielefeld: Transcript. de Nooy, Juliana (2005). Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Doniger, Wendy (2000). The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P. Eldred, Laura G. (2005). “‘Breaking the Love Laws’: Sibling Incest in Midnight’s Children and The God of Small Things.” Transgression and Taboo: Critical Essays. Eds. Vartan P. Messier and Nandita Batra. Mayaguez: ­Caribbean Chapter, 61–78. Greenblatt, Stephen (1988). Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley/London: U of California P. McCarthy, Tom (2008). Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Moretti, Franco (2007). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London/New York: Verso. Rogers, Thomas (2010). “Gay Porn’s Most Shocking Taboo.” Salon, www.­ salon.com/2010/05/21/twincest/. Satpathy, Sumanyu (1999). “The Code of Incest in The God of Small Things.” Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary. Ed. Rajinder Kumar Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 132–143.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. 26a 6, 12, 30, 229 abject/abjection 70, 138, 148, 167–70, 171, 173, 192, 197, 227 Achebe, Chinua see Things Fall Apart Adair, Gilbert see The Dreamers Adam & Eve 37, 200 Adams, Charles Warren see The Notting Hill Mystery Adaptation (film) 16, 96, 103, 115, 121–4, 128n10, 184, 231 adaptation 11, 39, 75, 85, 92–127, 128n10–11, 173, 195, 202, 212, 222; see also appropriation, fidelity, Thomas Leitch, original/originality adultery 2, 29, 33, 53, 57, 71, 77–9, 82, 105, 125, 153, 183; see also bed-trick, marriage Agamben, Giorgio 23, 195–7, 216n12; see also ‘bare life’, biopolitics, Michel Foucault, Homo Sacer All Is True 42; see also Ben Elton, Hamnet Shakespeare, William Shakespeare ambiguity 17, 30, 36–7, 56, 68, 85, 107, 126, 133, 162, 188, 189, 206, 214, 222 Amis, Martin see Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence ampersand 184–5, 215n3, 228, 231 androgyny 37, 39, 66, 84, 228; see also gender, queerness Angoor 98, 116–19, 124 animal 13, 21, 22, 76, 125, 145, 167, 170, 189, 203, 213, 228; see also litter birth

anthropometry 144, 194, 216n12; see also crime/criminality appropriation 15, 78, 94, 96, 99–103, 112, 117–21, 124–6, 128n9, 182, 202, 222; see also adaptation Aristotle 60, 69, 86n4, 71, 112, 210 Aśvin twins 32, 34 atavism 141, 144, 148, 160, 165, 168 Atonement 14, 146 Atwood, Margaret see The Handmaid’s Tale Austin Powers in Goldmember 225 ‘bare life’ 195–6; see also Giorgio Agamben, biopolitics, Homo Sacer barrenness 44n8–9, 76, 155, 170–3, 174n19, 199, 200 Barrie, J.M. see Peter Pan Barthes, Roland 31, 35, 41, 93; see also poststructuralism Baudrillard, Jean 10–11, 126, 137, 187–8, 190, 205–13, 215n6, 228; see also postmodernism, simulacrum Bean, Richard see One Man, Two Guvnors Beckett, Samuel see Waiting for Godot bed-trick 77–8, 112, 152, 182, 209, 232; see also adultery, eroticism behaviourism 14, 21, 25–6; see also environment, nature/nurture debate Benjamin, Walter 190, 213 Bergson, Henri 8, 55, 58, 226 Bible 34–5, 37, 44n9, 79, 83, 200; see also Christianity, Jesus Big Business (1929 film) 110–11

236 Index Big Business (1988 film) 98, 110–16, 119, 173n3 biopolitics 22–4, 76, 81, 193–205, 208, 209, 215, 216n12, 221; see also Giorgio Agamben, eugenics, Michel Foucault birth order 31, 34, 37, 83–5, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100, 124 The Black Island see Tintin Die blaue Hand see Creature with the Blue Hand The Blood of the Walsungs 38 Blood-Red Rivers 208 Bloom, Harold 92, 101, 102 Boccaccio, Giovanni see The Decameron body: actor’s 173n3, 204; dead 149, 153, 170, 186, 192, 197; corporeal dimension of twinship 10, 15, 67, 78, 138, 148; female 31, 67, 70, 74, 80, 156, 226; grotesque 80; maternal 5, 68, 83; medicalised 194; reproductive 73–4, 81, 84; vs. soul/spirit 30, 39, 152, 185; switch 151; see also abject/abjection, body double, body horror, body politic body double 107, 108, 138; see also visual effects/trickery body horror 78, 227; see also cannibalism, Dead Ringers, horror, parasite body politic 70, 75, 82, 167, 172–3 Bollywood see Angoor The Bomb-itty of Errors 98, 120–1 Borges, Jorge Luis see Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’ The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas 197 Boyne, John see The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas The Boys from Brazil (film) 189, 201–2, 202, 207, 215n7 The Boys from Brazil (novel) 198–203, 204, 207 The Boys from Syracuse 98, 119–20, 120, 204 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth see The Trail of the Serpent Brave New World 191–3, 199, 202 breeding 16, 24, 32, 76, 84, 194, 198, 203–5, 205, 208; see also barrenness, eugenics, fertility The Brothers Menaechmus 53, 63, 93–5, 99, 100, 111, 112, 114, 121, 128n9

Burnside, John see The Dumb House Butler, Judith 7, 44n13 Byron, George Gordon see Manfred Cage, Nicolas 122, 173n3 Caillois, Roger 134 Callaghan, Dympna 42, 80 camp see concentration camp Campbell, Joseph 6, 31 cannibalism 2, 9, 170, 227, 231; see also parasite, vampire, zombie The Canterville Ghost 13 capital, capitalism 76, 82, 84, 110, 112–15, 118, 224–5; see also commodity, economic relations, Karl Marx Carroll, Lewis see Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There The Case for the Defence 149 cell/cell division 3, 5–7, 11, 35–6, 37, 116, 170, 200, 205, 213, 216n15, 222, 228–9, 233 Chaplin, Charlie see City Lights Chatwin, Bruce 29, 40, 44n11; see also On the Black Hill children: adoption 193; cast as twins 17; illegitimate 104, 112; monstrous children 69–74; naming 3, 56, 112, 118; relationship with mothers 86n10; study of 194, 197, 203; twins as 3, 33; in the womb 5, 7, 33, 34, 36–8, 69, 83; see also father, mother, womb children’s literature 12, 13–4 Christianity 2, 55, 63, 68, 214; see also Bible, Jesus Christie, Agatha see detective novel, The Murder on the Links, The Unbreakable Alibi Cicero 35 circular logic see tautology City Lights 56, 158 climax see dénouement clone/cloning: controversy 11, 17, 181, 187, 190, 191, 206; difference to double 189; difference to twin 10, 181, 185, 186, 188–9, 215n5; in dystopian horror/sciencefiction 9, 11, 15, 44n13, 76, 189, 198–203, 205–10, 224; loss of aura/individuality 15, 114, 188, 190, 213; in popular culture 32–3, 44n12, 98, 189, 190–1, 193, 203–5,

Index  237 215n7, 215n9, 216n15; see also DNA, double, genetics, simulacrum Collins, Wilkie see also Poor Miss Finch, The Twin Sisters, Victorian age colonialism 28–9, 111, 116–19, 136, 138, 140–1, 145, 147, 148, 160, 165–8, 202, 212, 223, 229 Columbo 134–5, 154 comedy see farce, ‘mistaken identity’ plot, pun, slapstick The Comedy of Errors (adaptations) see Angoor, Big Business, The Bomb-itty of Errors, The Boys from Syracuse, The Comedy of Errors (film), The Comedy of Errors (Hull play), The Comedy of Errors (Reynolds Play), The Comedy of Terrible Errors, Oh, I Do Like to Be …, Our Relations, Zanzibar The Comedy of Errors (film) 98, 114 The Comedy of Errors (Hull play) 99–103, 121 The Comedy of Errors (Reynolds play) 100, 127n3 The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare play): as adaptation 92–6, 99; biographical reading 42–3; climax 59, 61, 67, 75, 79; critical reputation 50–1, 57–8, 94–5, 99; demonic subtext 62–8; as farce 53, 54–5, 99, 231; rhyming 55, 102, 121; setting 63; staging 60, 66, 97–8, 100; theme of commerce 81–2; see also The Comedy of Errors (adaptations), farce, William Shakespeare The Comedy of Terrible Errors 98 commodity 68, 82, 111, 115–16, 120, 168, 208; see also capital, economic relations, Karl Marx complementarity 27, 32, 137, 162; see also supplement concentration camp 22, 23–5, 186, 194–8, 199, 207; see also ‘bare life’, euthanasia, Josef Mengele, World War II confidence man see impostor confusion 16, 33, 50, 53–5, 59, 79, 105, 112, 123, 143, 146, 148, 210, 211, 226, 233n2; see also farce, ‘mistaken identity’ plot conjoined twins 2, 61, 86n7, 134, 138, 146, 152, 227, 230

conjuror see magic/magician conspiracy thriller 115, 199–201, 207–8 Cooney, Ray 12, 51, 52, 57, 61; see also farce, One for the Pot copy 67–8, 81, 95, 106, 107, 114, 115, 126, 182–90, 215n6; see also clone/cloning, simulacrum corporeality see body ‘Corsican trap’ 58, 86n5 Creature with the Blue Hand 135–6, 136, 138 crime/criminality 4, 10, 15, 24, 92, 94, 120, 136, 141, 143–6, 166, 173n5, 204, 207, 223; see also anthropometry, detective novel Cronenberg, David 78, 227 Culpeper, Nicholas 70, 72, 125 The Dark Circle 230, 233n1 The Dark Half 40 The Dark Mirror 135, 138–9, 139, 146–7, 147 Darwin, Charles 21, 123, 124, 141, 144, 150, 167, 194 David, Larry 52 Dawn of the Dead 192 The D. Case 164, 174n16; see also The Mystery of Edwin Drood The Decameron 225 De Palma, Brian see Sisters (film) Dead Ringers 78, 173n3, 227 Dekker, Thomas see Patient Grissill Deleuze, Gilles 7, 11, 148–9, 188, 206; see also poststructuralism demon see devil dénouement 58–64, 75, 97, 110, 113, 148, 181, 211, 214 Derrick, Joseph see Twins Derrida, Jacques 101, 126, 186, 188; see also différance, poststructuralism desire 2, 38, 51, 71, 77, 84, 96, 125, 137, 152, 166, 226; see also adultery, eroticism, sex/sexuality Despair 1–2, 128n8, 191 detective novel 9, 15, 50, 99, 118, 133–73, 174n18, 182, 222, 224, 226; see also crime, red herring deus ex machina 79, 185, 187 devil 9, 52, 62–8, 70–1, 75, 80–1, 102–3, 137–8, 142, 151, 159, 163, 165, 167; see also witch/witchcraft Dickens, Charles 14, 140, 152, 153, 158, 160, 164–70, 172, 173n2,

238 Index 174n12–13, 174n15–16, 210, 212, 224; see also The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Victorian age différance 13, 67 difference 1–3, 7, 9, 12, 26–8, 115, 125–6, 143, 149, 228, 232 divinity 11, 21, 31–4, 37, 39, 63, 68, 79, 197, 211, 214, 222; see also myth, Zeus dizygotic twins see non-identical twins DNA 27, 32, 123, 186–91, 200, 204, 208; see also clone/cloning, genetics Don’t Look Now 7, 9 doppelganger see double Das doppelte Lottchen see Lottie and Lisa double: difference to twin 10, 39, 50, 137–8, 188, 221, 223; as literary trope 55–7, 173n2, 181, 189–90, 215n1; in nineteenth-century culture 36, 71, 136–8, 154, 160; in psychology 114; as uncanny phenomenon 1, 8, 10, 63, 115, 185–6 double-take 60, 108–109, 109, 149, 201 Doyle, Arthur Conan see detective novel, Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four, The Speckled Band Dracula 153, 156, 158, 168 drama see farce, stage, tragedy The Dreamers 92, 126, 169, 228–30, 233 Dryden, John 51, 62 The Dualitists 86n5, 153, 170, 171 The Duchess of Malfi 38, 77, 85, 86n13; see also tragedy Duck Soup 113–14, 128n8; see also Marx Brothers du Maurier, Daphne see Don’t Look Now The Dumb House 14, 196–7 Dupont & Dupond see Tintin dystopia 11, 15, 44n13, 50, 76, 185–93, 200–2, 216n15 economic relations 30, 61, 73, 74, 76, 81, 82, 112–13, 120, 139, 171; see also capital, commodity, kinship egg 6, 27, 116–17, 117, 170, 191–2 Elizabethan Age 16, 65, 80, 81, 100, 111, 223; see also Renaissance Elton, Ben 41–2 embrace 8, 36, 36–7, 61, 79, 85, 102, 116, 127n4, 133, 149, 227–9, 231

Emecheta, Buchi see Kehinde environment 14, 22–8, 113, 150, 151, 188, 201, 205, 208, 212; see also behaviourism, genetics, nature/ nurture debate epistemology 10, 60–1, 64, 74, 78, 141, 146, 149, 153, 162, 189, 212, 222–3, 233 eroticism 2, 18n6, 76–7, 78, 122, 221–2, 225, 225–8; see also pornography, sex/sexuality Esau see Jacob and Esau ethnography 28–31, 37, 169; see also Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner eugenics 10, 21–5, 44n4, 76, 141–3, 173, 189, 191–9, 201–2, 204, 208, 209, 210–11, 223; see also biopolitics, breeding, Francis Galton, racism euthanasia 193, 211, 216; see also concentration camp, Holocaust Evans, Diana see 26a Eve see Adam & Eve ‘evil twin’ 4, 32, 50, 52, 134, 141, 146, 151, 152, 163, 185, 209–10; see also horror, rivalry, villain exorcism 43, 64, 65–7, 74–5, 102, 151, 190, 223; see also devil The Faerie Queene 38 fairy tale see Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm The Fall of the House of Usher 38, 149, 153, 170–1 farce: bedroom 76–8, 98, dénouements 58–62, 75–81, 173; genre 11, 85n2; on screen 97–8, 111, 216n17; plotting 52–5, 119; reputation 50–2, 75, 95, 98–9, 139; stage mechanisms 55–8, 97–9, 197 (see also staging/stage effects); subtexts of 67, 80–1, 114–15, 221–22; term 86n6; twin farce 43, 64, 73, 107, 183n1; see also The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare play), Ray Cooney, ‘mistaken identity’ plot, slapstick Farquhar, George see Love and a Bottle, The Twin Rivals Farrelly, Peter and Bobby see Stuck on You father 32, 33, 42, 67, 71, 80, 83, 112, 119, 125, 172, 190, 203, 204, 206, 212, 214–15; see also children, mother, patriarchy

Index  239 female twin 37, 38, 73, 76, 110–13, 158–9, 166–7, 199; see also androgyny, Big Business (1988 film), gender, male twin Fenech, Edwige 78 fertility 2, 27, 31, 70, 73, 75–7, 80–2, 84, 120, 139, 167, 170–3, 174n19, 189, 190, 191–3, 195, 203, 205–6, 223, 224; see also barrenness, pregnancy fetus-in-fetu 3 fidelity 96, 102, 122, 124–5; see also adultery, marriage film see horror, visual effects/trickery fingerprints 144–5 Finlayson, James 60, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111 first-born see birth order Follett, Ken see The Third Twin Ford, John see ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore Fordism 192 Foucault, Michel 24, 64, 74, 81, 84, 150, 194–5, 216n12; see also Giorgio Agamben, biopolitics, crime/criminality Fowler, Jermaine 83 Frankenstein 40, 67, 94, 127n1, 185, 189–90 fraternal twins see non-identical twins ‘freak show’ 2, 138, 152, 226 Freud, Sigmund 1, 41, 42, 70, 86n11, 137, 146, 156, 169, 222; see also Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis Fruttero & Lucentini see The D. Case Galton, Francis 21, 22, 24–6, 136, 141–6, 150, 162, 166, 171–3, 173n5, 194–5, 199–200, 207; see also eugenics, nature/nurture debate, twin method, Victorian age Gedda, Luigi 26 Gemini (Kipling story) 147, 148, 173n6 Gemini (star-sign) 32, 228 Gemini (Tournier novel) 6–7, 16, 34, 35, 43, 44n8, 170, 228, 233n2 gender 7, 18n6, 43, 53, 61, 65, 125, 138, 209, 215n9; see also androgyny, female twin, male twin, non-identical twins, queerness genetics 11, 12, 21–8, 84, 93, 104, 107, 142, 171, 172, 173n2, 188–91, 196, 199, 201, 203–4, 207–15, 215n5, 223; see also clone/cloning, DNA, nature/nurture debate

ghost 7, 8, 13, 53, 63, 64, 67, 75, 86n5, 126, 136, 149, 151, 160, 173n5, 174n12, 185, 202, 231; see also devil, deus ex machina gimmick see ‘incidental twin’ syndrome The Giver 193 god see divinity, Zeus The God of Small Things 228–30 Golding, William see Lord of the Flies Goldoni, Carlo 57, 127n2 Goodnight Mommy 18n9 Gothic 135, 141, 149, 151, 154, 160, 171, 185, 231; see also neo-Gothic grand guignol 59, 170; see also horror Grand, Sarah see The Heavenly Twins Grangé, Jean-Christophe see BloodRed Rivers Grant, Linda see The Dark Circle Greenblatt, Stephen 42, 63, 64, 223 Greene, Graham see The Case for the Defence Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 4, 30 grotesque 10, 79, 80, 163, 204, 227 Gurney, A.R. see The Perfect Party gynaecology 15, 36, 68, 74, 78, 227; see also midwife, pregnancy Hamlet 41, 42, 64 The Handmaid’s Tale 193 Hapgood 135 Haraway, Donna 214, 216n12 Hardy, Oliver see Our Relations Harry Potter (book series) 13–4, 18n6, 227 de Havilland, Olivia 135, 138–9, 39 The Heavenly Twins 12, 15, 143, 150 Her Fearful Symmetry 151–2 heredity 11, 14, 22–7, 43n1, 141–6, 171, 199, 200; see also DNA, eugenics, Francis Galton, genetics Hergé see Tintin heterosexuality 73, 75, 209, 227, 230; see also homosexuality, sex/ sexuality heuristic 136, 148; see also epistemology Hilton, Tony see One for the Pot Hinduism 32, 37; see also Aśvin twins Hitchcock, Alfred 16, 41, 59, 86n7, 94, 124, 161 Hitler, Adolf 189, 200–2 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 71, 136, 137 The Hole in the Wall 55, 75

240 Index Holmes, Sherlock 133, 140, 143, 144– 5, 149, 152, 157, 161, 168, 212; see also detective novel, Sherlock, The Sign of Four, The Speckled Band, Victorian age Holocaust 193–9; see also concentration camp, euthanasia The Holy Innocents see The Dreamers Homo Sacer 195–8; see also ‘bare life’, biopolitics homosexuality 4, 66, 86n9, 228; see also heterosexuality, sex/sexuality Horowitz, Anthony see Moriarty horror 4, 8, 9, 10, 16, 18n9, 32, 78, 86n5–6, 110, 115, 136–8, 149, 151–2, 158, 168, 171, 190, 227, 231 House, M.D. 3 Hull, Thomas see The Comedy of Errors (Hull play) Huxley, Aldous see Brave New World hybridity 85, 151, 190, 208, 214 hypnosis 154–5, 160; see also magnetism, mesmerism The Ice Twins 8 Ich seh, ich seh see Goodnight Mommy identical twins 1, 16, 18n6, 26, 27, 37, 86n14, 98, 105, 107, 110, 148, 158, 186, 191, 192, 215n5, 228; see also non-identical twins L’île noire see Tintin illegitimacy 32, 33, 38, 73, 83, 92, 94, 104, 112, 117, 125, 148, 159, 171, 206; see also birth order, kinship The Image in the Mirror 134 imperialism 117, 141, 148, 159, 160, 163, 164–9, 171, 172; see also Victorian age impostor 56, 62, 127, 144, 156, 162, 181 incest 11, 36–9, 44n10, 77–9, 85, 126, 151, 165, 169, 171, 222, 224–30, 232 ‘incidental twin’ syndrome 13–4, 50, 135, 140, 192, 221, 226 individual 4, 61, 93, 145, 187–8, 215, 222, 233n2; see also singleton innuendo 54, 81, 98, 103, 172; see also pun Inside No. 9 see Zanzibar Invasion of the Body Snatchers 115 in-vitro fertilisation 5, 189, 206; see also fertility, barrenness

Isis see Osiris & Isis IVF see in-vitro fertilisation Jacob and Esau 34–5, 44n9; see also Bible, Christianity, myth Jacobs, W.W. see The Money-Box Jesus 34, 44n9, 79; see also Bible, Christianity Jurassic Park 190; see also clone/ cloning, monster Jurassic World 190–1, 215n9; see also clone/cloning, monster Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics 23–4, 44n2, 195–6; see also eugenics, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer Kästner, Erich see Lottie and Lisa Kaufman, Charlie see Adaptation (film) Keaton, Buster see The Playhouse Kehinde 30, 44n6, 229 King Lear 100, 224 King, Stephen see The Dark Half, The Shining kinship 10, 11, 30, 34–6, 52, 75, 81–5, 105, 222; see also birth order Kinski, Klaus 135–6, 136, 138 Kipling, Rudyard see Gemini Konar, Affinity see Mischling Kray twins see Legend Kristeva, Julia see abject/abjection Kubrick, Stanley see The Shining laboratory 14, 26, 74, 190, 191, 194–5, 198, 206, 215n7; see also twin experiment, twin method Lacan, Jacques 7, 18n7, 94, 114–16; see also Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis Land of Black Gold see Tintin Laurel, Stan see Our Relations Legend 107, 126–7 Leitch, Thomas 93, 94, 96, 111, 117, 124, 128n11; see also adaptation Let Her Out 110 Levin, Ira see The Boys from Brazil (novel) Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2, 29, 32, 37, 82, 105, 125; see also ethnography, kinship Link, Kelly see The Specialist’s Hat litter birth 21 Little Miss Twins 12

Index  241 Lombroso, Cesare 144; see also crime/ criminality Look Away 110 loop 230–3 Lord of the Flies 14, 148 Lottie and Lisa 9, 110, 128n7; see also children’s literature Love and a Bottle 72 Lowry, Lois see The Giver McCarthy, Tom 231–2, 233n3 McEwan, Ian see Atonement madness 14, 16, 53, 63–5, 74, 85, 118, 136, 154, 170–1, 186–7, 189, 190, 199–200, 208; see also psychology, schizophrenia magic/magician 31, 57, 59, 62–8, 126, 138, 140, 152, 173n1, 181–6, 202, 215n1, 228; see also witch/ witchcraft magnetism 154–8, 160, 174n10; see also hypnosis, mesmerism male twin 76, 166, 192, 199, 228; see also androgyny, female twin, gender Manfred 38–9 Mann, Thomas 225; see also The Blood of the Walsungs Marathon Man 203 marriage 53, 61, 62, 64, 73, 75–6, 79–84, 102, 106, 166, 170–3, 224; see also adultery, fidelity, kinship Marx Brothers 107, 113, 128n8, 139 Marx, Karl 10, 26, 211; see also commodity, economic relations Mary Poppins 13 maternal see mother matriarchy 79, 96–7, 214; see also father, mother, patriarchy Menaechmi see The Brothers Menaechmus Mengele, Josef 14, 23, 24, 193, 194, 196–203, 208, 211, 216n13; see also euthanasia, Holocaust, twin experiment mesmerism 155–60, 174n10, 185; see also hypnosis, magnetism Les météores see Gemini (Tournier novel) Midler, Bette see Big Business (1988 film) midwife 11, 36, 38, 65, 68–74, 81, 83, 86n10, 124, 190, 227; see also gynaecology, ‘monstrous birth’, pregnancy

Milne, A.A. see The Red House Mystery mimicry 212 Minnesota twin study 2, 27–8 mirror motif 16–17, 17, 55, 113–15, 118, 124, 128n8, 138–9, 201 Mischling 6, 196 misogyny 207, 209, 215n9; see also patriarchy ‘mistaken identity’ plot 9, 15, 16, 32, 33, 50, 54, 85n1, 98, 99, 123, 137, 138, 197; see also farce The Money-Box 104–5, 108 monomyth see Joseph Campbell monozygotic twins see identical twins monster 3, 5, 31, 38, 61, 67, 70, 71, 94, 168, 185, 215n9; see also ‘monstrous birth’ ‘monstrous birth’ 11, 36, 52, 68–75, 81, 84 Moretti, Franco 224 Moriarty 133 mother 5, 8, 29, 33, 34, 68–75, 83, 86n10, 169, 193, 199, 215n9, 230; see also children, father, matriarchy The Murder on the Links 134 music 98, 103, 107, 111, 119–21, 127n2, 128n9, 164 My Sister-in-Law 78 The Mystery of Edwin Drood 153, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164–71, 174n13, 174n15–16, 210, 212, 224; see also The D. Case, detective novel myth: African 30–1; divine origins of twins 33–4, 44n7, 68, 79, 211; foundational 9–10, 35; fraternal rivalry 34–6; incestuous 37–9, 165, 210; twin mythology 2, 31–3, 68, 170, 189, 197, 199, 214, 222; see also Roland Barthes, Bible, divinity, ethnography, Hinduism, monomyth, Zeus Nabokov, Vladimir see Despair narcissism 2, 4, 11, 38, 106, 114–15, 122, 187, 203, 212, 228 Narcissus see narcissism narrative perspective/voice 14, 154, 158, 162, 167, 183–5, 212–13 National Socialism 21–5, 26, 142, 173, 189, 198–204, 208, 209, 211 nature/nurture debate 4, 21–2, 25–8, 39, 123, 141–3, 201, 204, 209, 213,

242 Index 222; see also genetics, environment, Francis Galton neo-Gothic 3, 9, 138, 149, 151, 158, 168; see also Gothic neo-Victorianism 150–1, 181, 187; see also Victorian age Niffenegger, Audrey see Her Fearful Symmetry Nolan, Christopher see The Prestige (film) non-identical twins 16, 27, 41, 86n14, 142, 153, 165, 173n2; see also identical twins de Nooy, Julia 7, 9, 35, 126, 221, 227 The Notting Hill Mystery 153–60, 161, 171, 174n7, 174n8, 174n13 nurture see nature/nurture debate Oates, Joyce Carol 40, 44n11, 78 The Office 8 Oh, I Do Like to Be … 44n12, 64, 78, 95, 98, 204 On the Black Hill 13, 44n11, 230, 232 One for the Pot 12, 56–8, 65, 75, 78; see also Ray Cooney One Man, Two Guvnors 57 original/originality 10, 11, 67, 68, 93–6, 98, 99, 101, 118, 122–4, 128n10, 185, 187–8, 190, 210; see also adaptation, copy, fidelity Orton, Joe 25, 51, 79, 114; see also What the Butler Saw Osiris & Isis 37 Other/Othering 29, 136–7, 140–3, 147, 148, 160, 161, 166, 168–9; see also racism, xenophobia Our Relations 98, 103–10, 110, 16, 118, 128n5–6 Ouroboros 122, 184, 228, 230–1 Ours 10, 12, 139 ovum see egg parasite 3, 76, 101; see also cannibalism, vampire Paré, Ambroise 71 paternal see father Patient Grissill 72, 84 patriarchy 31–2, 34, 36, 42, 68, 70, 73–4, 79, 80–4, 111, 156, 173, 190, 216n15; see also father, matriarchy, mother Pausanias 38 Peele, Jordan see Us

The Perfect Party 55, 85n2 Peter Pan 13, 157 Phillips, Marie see Oh, I Do Like to Be … Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’ 101, 103 Pierre Menard, autor del ‘Quijote’ see Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’ Placenta 37, 169–70 Plato 5–6, 7, 32, 37, 104, 188, 230 Plautus see The Brothers Menaechmus The Playhouse 147–8, 148 Poe, Edgar Allan 38, 94, 136, 149, 152; see also The Fall of the House of Usher Poole, John see The Hole in the Wall Poor Miss Finch 153, 157, 160–5, 167, 171–3 pornography 2, 224–7; see also eroticism, incest, sex/sexuality postmodernism 39, 96, 122, 186, 213 poststructuralism 7, 10, 11, 233n3; see also Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, différance, simulacrum pregnancy 5, 7, 8, 17n2, 33, 38, 44n7, 71–5, 77, 80–1, 124–5, 172, 199, 203, 206; see also gynaecology, midwife, ‘monstrous birth’ Presley, Elvis 34 The Prestige (film) 173n3, 181–3, 183, 186, 189, 202, 215n4 The Prestige (novel) 66, 181–6, 187, 189, 202, 228, 231 La pretora see My Sister-in-Law Priest, Christopher see The Prestige (novel) primogeniture see birth order progeny see fertility Psycho 59, 124; see also Alfred Hitchcock, horror psychoanalysis 6–7, 16, 41–2, 113, 137, 155, 169–70; see also abject/ abjection, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek psychology 14, 25, 26–8, 29, 31, 135, 137–8, 143, 155, 157, 181, 207; see also madness, schizophrenia Pudd’nhead Wilson 145 pun 10, 12, 55–6, 66, 68, 72, 80, 107, 114, 116, 121, 126, 170, 206, 226; see also ambiguity

Index  243 Queen, Ellery see The Siamese Twin Mystery queerness 66, 80, 227; see also androgyny, gender; Twelfth Night quotation/quotation marks 100, 103, 125–6, 151, 184; see also original/ originality race see eugenics racism 8–9, 141, 163, 166, 168, 211; see also biopolitics, imperialism, Other/Othering, xenophobia red herring 134, 135, 140, 146, 161, 226; see also crime/criminality, detective novel The Red House Mystery 135 Reduced Shakespeare Company 52–3 Remus see Romulus & Remus Renaissance 4, 10, 36, 37, 67–9, 71, 73–4, 86n10, 93, 124, 190; see also Elizabethan Age reproduction see barrenness, fertility Reynolds, Frederick see The Comedy of Errors (Reynolds play) rhyme 55, 102, 121, 143 Rider, William see The Twins rivalry 31, 32, 34–6, 40, 85, 92, 216n14; see also ‘evil twin’, primogeniture Les rivières pourpres see Blood-Red Rivers Robertson, T.W. see Ours Romulus & Remus 34–5, 200; see also myth Rowling, Joanne K. see Harry Potter (book series) Roy, Arundhati see The God of Small Things sameness 1, 9, 11, 27, 191–3, 232; see also difference, singleton Saturday Night Live 78, 86n14 Sayers, Dorothy L. see The Image in the Mirror schizophrenia 16, 40, 44n4, 56, 57, 59, 122, 136, 183, 212, 224; see also madness, psychology Schoeller, Martin 1, 9 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 7, 16, 32, 203–5, 216n15, see also Twins (film) second-born see birth order seeing 56–7, 59, 60, 109–10, 114, 118, 145, 146; see also

epistemology, mirror motif, visual effects/trickery Segal, Nancy L. 2, 26, 28, 125, 215n4 sensationalism 29, 69, 99, 150, 152–5, 158, 164 Setterfield, Diane see The Thirteenth Tale sex/sexuality: abuse 30, 84, 207, 209–10; female 65, 70, 77, 113, 125, 156, 172, 201; Freud/ psychoanalysis 86n11; hygiene 24; in farce 76, 78, 106 (see also farce); of twins 4, 37, 68, 74, 78, 166, 228, 233n1; role in biopolitics 24, 206, 209 (see also fertility); with twin 2, 37, 78, 126, 214, 216n18, 224–7; see also adultery, bed-trick, desire, eroticism, heterosexuality, homosexuality, incest, pornography Shaffer, Anthony 40–1, 135 Shaffer, Peter 40–1 Shakespeare, Hamnet 41–3, 72 Shakespeare, William: as author of farce 9, 50–1, 52–4, 57–8; as adaptor 52–3, 63, 92–6, 99, 106, 121; ‘bardolatry’ 93–5, 99–102, 116–18, 127n3–4; as father of twins 40, 41–3, 72; collaborations 85n3; ‘Problem Plays’ 62, 85, 86n8; sonnets 81; see also The Comedy of Errors, Elizabethan Age, farce, Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Hamnet Shakespeare, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, tragedy Sharp, Jane 69, 73, 125 Shaw, George Bernard 51, 56, 58–9, 60, 93, 139; see also You Never Can Tell Sherlock 133; see also Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four, The Speckled Band The Shining 7, 17n3, 110, 151 Siamese twins see conjoined twins The Siamese Twin Mystery 134 The Sign of Four 140, 149, 168, 173; see also detective novel, Sherlock Holmes A Simple Favor 148, 151 The Simpsons 14 simulacrum 39, 186–8, 206; see also Jean Baudrillard, postmodernism, poststructuralism singleton 5, 7, 17n2, 31, 146, 171; see also sameness

244 Index Sister, Sister 78 Sisters (film) 16–17, 17, 139 slapstick 98, 103–8, 201; see also City Lights, comedy, farce, Our Relations, The Playhouse slave 35, 53, 102, 106, 114, 160, 190 Smith, Zadie see White Teeth sorcery see magic The Specialist’s Hat 151, 231 spectre see ghost The Speckled Band 140–1, 174n11, 174n13; see also detective novel, Sherlock Holmes Spenser, Edmund see The Fairie Queene split 6–7, 12, 37, 40, 113, 116, 119, 185, 212, 222, 224, 229, 233; see also cell/cell division split-screen 16–17, 17, 139; see also visual effects/trickery staging/stage effects 52–61, 63, 64, 66, 79, 86n5, 97, 98, 99, 102, 138–9, 181–2, 185, 223; see also visual effects/trickery stillbirth 72–3, 182, 186; see also midwife, ‘monstrous birth’, pregnancy Stoker, Bram see Dracula, The Dualitists Stoppard, Tom see Hapgood Stuck on You 146, 227 subliminal 2, 30–1, 40, 106, 137, 140, 146, 147, 148, 159, 163, 190, 208, 224; see also psychoanalysis superfetation 29, 33, 124–5 supplement 12, 43, 54, 56, 61, 67, 107, 113, 184, 187, 213; see also complementarity Swift, Graham see Tomorrow symmetry 9, 54, 55, 58, 77, 84, 105, 108, 210 tautology see circular logic The Tempest 58, 95 The Third Twin 205–10, 214 The Thirteenth Tale 3, 7, 151 Thomson & Thompson see Tintin Thorndike, E.L. 25–6, 142, 173n4 Things Fall Apart 28 Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There 13, 143, 147 Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence 198–9

Tintin 13, 231–3 Tintin au pays de l’or noir see Tintin ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore 79 Tomlin, Lily see Big Business (1988 film) Tomorrow 206, 216n14 Tournier, Michel see Gemini tragedy 41, 52, 67, 74, 77, 85n3, 211, 228 The Trail of the Serpent 144, 149, 152–3, 161, 165, 168–70, 173, 174n14 trauma 4–7, 137, 229, 230; see also psychoanalysis, split Travers, P.L. see Mary Poppins Tremayne, S.K. see The Ice Twins tribes see ethnography Turner, Victor 29–30; see also ethnography Twain, Mark 40, 145, 173n2; see also Pudd’nhead Wilson Tweedledum & Tweedledee see Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There Twelfth Night: adaptations 97; biographical reading 42–3; climax 59, 61–2, 80, 84, 127n4; critical reputation 50, 54, 86n8; demonic subtext 65–6; double effects 56; gender 53, 61, 66, 75–6, 81, 84; madness 64; plot 53, 54, 59, 61; puns 71–2, 80; twinship in 37, 53, 59–61, 74; visuality 60, 72 twin experiment 14, 23, 41, 186, 193, 199, 201, 204, 210; see also Josef Mengele twin method 14, 22, 27, 186; see also Francis Galton The Twin Rivals 52, 54–5, 56, 57, 62, 63, 65, 68, 84, 82–3, 84, 85, 100 twins see conjoined twins, female twins, identical twins, male twins, non-identical twins twinship as gimmick see ‘incidental twin’ syndrome The Twin Sisters (Collins story) 172 The Twin Sisters; or, the Effects of Education (anonymous novel) 14 Twins (Derrick play) 54, 55, 60, 62–3, 64, 65, 138, 159–60 Twins (film) 7, 16, 32, 203–5 The Twins (Rider play) 51, 62, 76, 77–8

Index  245 Twins of Evil 110 The Twins; or, Which is Which? 59, 100–2 Two Much 56, 58, 76–7, 78, 84, 85n2, 225 umbilical cord 36, 75, 112, 118, 135 The Unbreakable Alibi 134 uncanny: Freudian concept 1; double 10, 63, 137, 186; in horror fiction 32, 136; in nineteenth-century culture 8, 138, 149, 152–3, 212, 221; twin encounter 3, 4, 7, 16, 62, 75, 81, 115, 136, 138–9, 139, 149, 158, 192; see also Sigmund Freud, horror, psychoanalysis unconscious see subliminal ‘unnatural birth’ see ‘monstrous birth’ Us 110, 137 uterus see womb vampire 94; see also Dracula, parasite, zombie ‘vanishing twin’ syndrome 3, 5, 7, 11, 30, 32, 35, 41, 44n13, 115, 126, 181; see also fetus-in-fetu, trauma La verità sul caso D. see The D. Case Verschuer, Otmar Freiherr von 22–6, 44n4, 142, 191, 194–8 Victorian age 7, 10, 11, 16, 58, 72, 133, 136, 138–57, 160, 162–4, 167–73, 174n8, 174n19, 182, 185, 223, 224; see also neo-Victorianism villain 55, 58, 62, 63, 66, 112, 136, 144, 154, 156–61, 164, 200, 208; see also ‘evil twin’ visual effects/trickery 59, 107, 116, 135, 138–9, 139, 173n3, 183, 185; see also seeing, split-screen, staging/ stage effects visuality see seeing Waiting for Godot 51 Wallace, Edgar 135–6

Wälsungenblut see The Blood of the Walsungs Webster, John see The Duchess of Malfi Westlake, Donald see Two Much What Happened to Monday 193, 216n10 What the Butler Saw 51, 58, 79; see also Joe Orton White Teeth 30, 147–8, 210–15, 216n17–18, 221 whodunit see detective novel Wilde, Oscar see The Canterville Ghost Wilder, Thornton 40, 42 witch/witchcraft 53, 62–8, 75, 121, 142; see also devil, magic/magician Wodehouse, P.G. 173n1 womb 6, 7, 34, 36–8, 69, 71, 73–4, 83, 96, 124, 134, 155, 165, 170, 172, 190, 206, 216n15, 225–6, 229; see also body, gynaecology, pregnancy Woods, William see The Twins; or, Which is Which? World War I 23 World War II 26, 29, 43n1, 142, 198, 211; see also concentration camp, euthanasia, Holocaust xenophobia 51, 117; see also racism You Never Can Tell 51, 56, 60 Zanzibar 55, 98 Zazzo, René 29 Zeus 33, 104, 214; see also divinity, myth Žižek, Slavoj 10, 114, 205–6; see also psychoanalysis Zolidis, Don see The Comedy of Terrible Errors zombie 115, 192; see also cannibalism, Dawn of the Dead, vampire

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