Doubling Up

The Treatment of Twins in Literature, Film & TV

Doubling Up: The Treatment of Twins in Literature, Film & TV

Twins are everywhere in contemporary fiction, or so it seems. Recent novels to feature what Bernardine Evaristo has called the “perfect conceit” include Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020) and Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground (2021) – both of which made it on to the shortlist of the 2021 Women’s Prize – Edmund White’s A Saint from Texas (2020) and Maryse Condé’s The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana (2017), as well as a clutch of YA and middle-grade books. The “conceit” is not just handy but time-honoured: separated twins appear in Plautus’s Menaechmi, an idea stolen and expanded brilliantly by Shakespeare for his farce of mistaken identities, The Comedy of Errors. The reasons for this prevalence may seem obvious but, as a twin myself, I sometimes wonder how concerned authors really are with the existential experience of twinship.

It is certainly a unique way of being in the world, especially if you are a same-gender identical twin – or monozygotic, from a blastocyst that divides in the womb. You are literally a genetic copy of another human being, while having “an equivalent centre of self”, in the words of George Eliot, though your fingerprints are different, which was helpful to the 1960s police force when dealing with the Krays. Twins tend to be at once incredibly close and supportive but also competitive and combative – in search of their individuality away from their collective identity. They are, unlike non-twin siblings, always developing in parallel. In behavioural psychoanalytical terms, they have to individuate twice: once from their parents and again from each other.

Twinship provokes knotty philosophical conundrums, meaty material for any novelist. There is, for example, the question of whether identical twins have the same soul. Christian theology has never been clear about when the soul is handed out. Is it at conception, or at some point when the embryo is still in the womb, or, as the Romans believed, when a baby draws its first breath? Then there is the maxim, attributed to Diogenes: “We come into the world alone, and we die alone”. The first part of this is obviously a fallacy for twins, even if the second part is not, and much has been written on the trauma of twins predeceasing one other. Shakespeare – himself the father of twins – got the psychology right with the two Dromios at the close of The Comedy of Errors. As they depart together, Dromio of Ephesus says: ‘We came into this world like brother and brother / And now let’s go hand in hand not one before another”. This is the ultimate restoration of harmony at the end of a comedy: the impossible desire for twins somehow to defy nature, to outface death by experiencing it together.

Sadly, however, the experience of twinship is so often ridden over roughshod by authors in search of a compelling plot or, worse, “freak value”. Admittedly, 3,000 years of popular culture haven’t helped. Lewis Carroll’s squabbling Tweedledum and Tweedledee have their antecedents in the warring Romulus and Remus, or the cheating Jacob and Esau, or, further back, the feuding Horus and Set. It is easy to see twins as eternally at odds or infantile. They seem to promote either fear or laughter. These two poles might be embodied by the sinister sisters in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and the jovial, grinning faces of Craig and Charlie Reid from The Proclaimers. The popular myths surrounding twins – from their apparent telepathy to the notion of the good versus evil twin – also have many of their roots in ancient cultural practices and superstitions. In Yoruba culture, twins are thought of as fortunate, even magical beings. In other traditions, they are figured as more menacing. In Twins and the Double (1993) the mythologist John Lash talks of the devitalizing powers of the double, how the basis of voodoo magic is the duplicated doll. He posits that twins are not complementary, unresolved polarities, like yin and yang, or light and dark, but copies. A man and his double will never resolve. In some South American myth systems, the first-born twin is divine – the clever, capable, heroic one – while the second-born is mortal: lazy and foolish. An older twin was sometimes cast as the sun, with the younger as the moon.

Mythology is full of the danger of seeing or having a double, long thought to be a harbinger of death, a trope found in gothic literature, and in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846), in which the protagonist, fearing his own effacement, warns his double: “Either you or I, but both together is out of the question!” Freud, in his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), suggested that repeated images were inherently unsettling. Spiritually, twinship compounds Descartes’s “cogito”. Everybody is a twin in the Cartesian sense of being both soul and body. We all suffer a Marvellian dialogue that remains unresolved our whole lives. Twins suffer two. As a condition, it can be exhausting.

Why, then, with such complexities on offer, do writers so often reduce, traduce or patronize twins on the page? Fiction centring on twins is often all surface, with no depth or psychological nuance. I’ve always wanted to see twins depicted accurately and sensitively in fiction, but frequently find myself wincing when they are used as a plot mechanism rather than as a means of exploring a particular and sometimes peculiar psychology. Ann Morgan, the author of the creaky twins thriller Beside Myself (2016), enthuses, “the plotting possibilities of people who can switch places are enormous”. And maybe that’s precisely the problem: twins are just too tempting as a literary device. Thus, while Bennett’s The Vanishing Half is undoubtedly an acute exploration of the US Civil Rights struggle during the 1950s and 60s, including provocative and timely insights into the subjects of “passing” and colourism, it seems oddly uninterested in Stella and Desiree’s inner experience of being twins. Even the reductive “half” of the title seems to eschew the individual, alluding to a collective identity. Twinship may not be where the novel’s emphasis lies, but more curiosity might have reinforced the themes of identity, othering and exclusion explored so well elsewhere.

White gets close to adumbrating twinship in A Saint from Texas, when one of the book’s twins, Yvonne, reflects on her sister: “What remains was the intuition that for a long day we’d been a single cell”. Yet, this is the only notable observation about twins in a lengthy novel more concerned with following Yvonne’s picaresque adventures around the Parisian fashion world. Another veteran, celebrated novelist, Maryse Condé, similarly spurns the opportunity to investigate twinship in the episodic The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana, in which she concentrates on the incestuous relationship of her different-gender twins at the expense of understanding their platonic bond. It feels prurient, and one wonders (as one frequently does when reading twins fiction) why she didn’t just make them siblings instead, as in Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terrible (1929). Once again, the singular “life” of the title strips away individuality.

The most convincing recent literary portrait of twinship appears in Fuller’s Unsettled Ground, which presents its different-gender middle-aged twins as trapped in a kind of lifelong dysfunctional marriage. Fuller has stated, “there have been quite a few twins in my family, but unfortunately in all cases only one of each pair survived into adulthood” – and perhaps this experience has honed her sensitivities, encouraging her to treat twinship as more than just a conceit. Yet, even Fuller doesn’t quite seem to write twins from the “inside”.

To my mind, it is contemporary drama, rather than fiction, that has got closest to providing accurate portrayals of the twin experience. Examples of this include the eight-part Norwegian television series Twin (2019), which follows a twin who covers up his brother’s death and assumes his identity, with both roles played, with thwarted Nordic intensity, by Kristofer Hivju – quite a feat given that he had to differentiate between the two while needing to do precisely the opposite within the context of the drama. David Eldridge’s radio play First Out (2020) explores the myths of twin primogeniture with empathy and insight. And then there is the long-running American television series This Is Us (2016-2022), whose physically mismatched twins echo the comic trope of Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Twins (1988), but this time with sensitivity and insight.

Ultimately, anyone tackling twinship should take care. My own identity as a twin isn’t a publishing trend or a “perfect” literary conceit but a way of being in the world that should fully engage any half-decent writer’s imagination and powers. Authors ought to try to get it right. Or at least half right.

This essay was first published in the TLS in January 2022