The Double (Part Three): Twins

Why can't we just be who we are . . .

In his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), Sigmund Freud attempted to identify the anthropological roots of the Double motif. Already in 1911 he had written a letter to his then friend C.C. Jung in which he describes the fascination with twins in some European mythologies. In Freud’s opinion the ancestors of the doppelgänger motif could be traced back to its mythical roots in antiquity, and our ancestors’ fascination with twins.

The uncanny, in Freud’s treatment, was associated with a series of topics such as telepathy, madness, animism, and claustrophobia. Freud also argued that uncanniness occurs when something alien is presented in a familiar context or vice versa. The appearance in literary works of doubleness expresses the opposition between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, reason and instinct. Freud also argues that, through the double, one is able to somehow extend oneself beyond the limitations of the single self. For example, in Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason acts as a double for Jane, representing two sides of one Self; similarly, Isabella Linton's docile and meek character casts her as a double for the passionate Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights.

Twins

Twins provide an opportunity to explore doubleness in a fairly obvious and sometimes comedic fashion, as exemplified in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, but twins also hold a perennial fascination in artworks across the centuries, and the birth of twins in the literary art of the Middle Ages frequently marked an opportunity for one woman to accuse another of adultery and thus the twins as illegitimate.

Twins have provided anthropologists with a lot to think about over the past century or so, not least Claude Lévi–Strauss, who, according to William Viney, found in ‘the quasi-animality of twins’ the inspiration for his famous line about natural species being ‘good to think with.’

Widely quoted and influential this statement encapsulates a way of seeing and interpreting the cultural beliefs of others by recognising how material objects, animals, and other totems do not exist to serve straightforward utilitarian purposes. Rather, these are things by which the world comes to be identified and understood, objects of thought whose symbolic substance reflects the ways in which humans construct and assign meaning. What is especially complex about this statement is that the equivalence made between animals and twins, in whatever context, is understood as an instrument for modelling social relations while, of course, being a social relation in their own right. Their lack of unitary exclusivity, as mobile and symbolic intermediaries, makes twins thinking, feeling things who do work for both the subjects of study (e.g. the Nuer) and the anthropologist who seeks to refine a descriptive expertise or, as Lévi-Strauss does, uses them to provide the evidence for a foundational and universally observed form of human cognition. It must be emphasised, therefore, that twins in these anthropological texts are objects with which to establish, test and debate the nature of ‘anthropological authority’.

The photographer Diane Arbus has a famous picture of identical twins, taken in Roselle, New Jersey.

At a fleeting look, it seems like a normal photo of two very similar girls. They are innocently standing in an almost comparable pose, gazing at the camera as a stranger takes their photograph. Part of the uncanny resemblance was because Arbus ensured that close attention was paid to the minute details of how the girls dressed and presented themselves before the camera. However, in all its denial, the ‘differences’ in parallelism and uniformity exhibited in the photo slowly and unavoidably creeps up in the mind of the viewer.

The peculiarity and haunting nature of the twin image inspired many other artists, including Stanley Kubrick, whose horror movie, The Shining, based on Stephen King’s eponymous novel, also features twin sisters in similar dresses and pose. With a soulless gaze and abnormal appearance of sameness, their visions disturbed and haunted audiences worldwide.

‘There are times’, writes Colm Tóibín, in an essay about the photographer, ‘when Arbus manages to create an image whose effect is subtle and hard to be sure about. This includes her 1967 picture of identical twin girls taken in Roselle, New Jersey, in a Knights of Columbus Hall.

The photo was printed so that the girls’ dark dresses seem to connect . . . They are both making sure that the camera sees them, or maybe each one is in a very different way making sure that the camera sees her. There is something helpless and gripping and fully alert about them in their twoness that remains also nearly true when you study only one of them. The picture is almost funny, and then it isn’t. Each girl, when you look again, seems remarkably herself, unique. But of course they are freakishly similar and still, despite everything, quite alone. They defy the viewer to care too much about whether the photographer had a cruel streak or was a weird person or had an unhealthy interest in freaks. They seem too full of their own concerns.

Apparently — Tóibín continues — the twins’ father ‘thought that it was “the worst likeness of the girls we’d ever seen,” but that was hardly the point. The girls are standing, posing, right beside each other. They are wearing the same clothes. And they are looking at the camera. One girl is smiling more than the other and seems softer, sweeter but she is also slightly pitiful. The other is tougher, harder. She may be having ugly thoughts.’

I have thought about this paragraph quite a bit over the years (I used to teach an MA class that referenced the photograph and the appearance of the twins in The Shining). I wondered how I might feel, were I one of the twins, and had occasion to read about myself as being ‘pitiful’ or ‘having ugly thoughts’ on the basis of this photograph.

So I was pleased to discover, while researching this post, that Toibin’s essay in the London Review of Books received a somewhat weary response from a reader who happens to be a twin. I will close, therefore, with the letter in its entirety:

Identical twins always fascinate but Diane Arbus’s photograph Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ, 1967 prompts some rather specious speculation from Colm Tóibín (LRB, 2 March). ‘One girl is smiling more than the other,’ he writes, ‘and seems softer, sweeter but she is also slightly pitiful. The other is tougher, harder. She may be having ugly thoughts.’ Here’s a different hypothesis: they do not want to be photographed yet again; they prefer different clothes; they resent being treated as a unit; they may not want to be together at all. The girl who is smiling doesn’t look pitiful, but like a pleasant, ordinary girl. The other girl doesn’t bother hiding her feelings. I make these suggestions in the light of my own experiences in childhood.

Roger Morsley-Smith
London W4

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. For many years he led the MA and PhD programmes in Creative & Critical Writing at Cardiff University, Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.