Juliana de Nooy (Auth.) - Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture - Look Twice-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2005)

Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Also by Juliana de Nooy
DERRIDA, KRISTEVA, AND THE DIVIDING LINE

Twins in Contemporary
Literature and Culture
Look Twice
Juliana de Nooy
University of Queensland
© Juliana de Nooy 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-4745-1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Nooy, Juliana.
Twins in contemporary literature and culture : look twice / Juliana de Nooy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Twins in literature. 2. Fiction–20th century–History and criticism.

3. Twins in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN56.5.T85D4 2005
809′.933552–dc22 2004066394
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
On our own, you wouldn’t look at us twice. But, put us together…
ANGELA CARTER, Wise Children
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Contents
List of Illustrations x
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction xiii
1 Look Twice: Narrative Uses of Twins 1

At first glance: a profusion of twin tales, a multitude of 1
meanings
A closer look: family resemblances 4
Genre and gender: twinned constraints 6
Exhausting twins 8
Looking back: existing studies of twins and doubles 9
The double in decline 12
Not a trifling matter 15
Convergences of genre and gender 17
Looking forward 19
2 Twins and The Couple: Surviving Sameness in Novels 21

of Twin Lives
The Bloomfield’s closed circle 21
The wages of twins 22
Patrick White: Arthur, Waldo and the marbles 30
Michel Tournier: Jean-Paul and the elastic bubble 32
Bruce Chatwin: Lewis, Benjamin and the eggs 35
Single egg twins 37
From two to three 39
Telling twins together 45
3 Twins and Sexual Rivalry: Recasting the Wicked Sister 47

in Thriller Films (co-authored with Bronwyn Statham)
Gender in twin films 48
Evil twin sisters 49
Revamping the ideal woman 51
Wicked twin brothers 52
Erotic triangles 54
vii
viii Contents
Lies of the Twins: a role reversal 55

Twins and the split image of woman 66
4 Twins and the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’: Patterns in Body 68

Horror Cinema (co-authored with Bronwyn Statham)
Conjoined twin brothers in horror 68
Genre and gender 69
Dead Ringers (Cronenberg): ‘a view from the womb’ 70
Basket Case (Henenlotter): keeping a lid on it 71
Basket Case II: coming up for air 74
The X Files: staying out late 74
Horror and the male body 77
The Dark Half (Romero): in denial 81
Twin Falls Idaho (Polish brothers): deflecting the maternal 83
Shifting the pattern 87
5 Twins and the ‘Gay Gene’ Debate: When Queer Comic 89

Fiction Meets Behaviour Genetics
A queer twist on twin tales 89
Identical, except … 90
Quest for the ‘gay gene’ 93
Rodi’s Drag Queen: multiple gay identities 97
Dragging for identity 105
Comedies of errors 108
Parody and purpose 112
6 Twins and Nations: Tales of Cultural Divides 114

National fissures 114
‘Siamese’ nations 115
The border between them 116
Changelings 118
A double take on identity 120
Identity and the identical: Humbert’s A l’autre bout 121
de moi
Nowhere land 128
Island homes 135
7 Twins as Doubtful Doubles: Postmodern Identity, 137

Irony and Invention
Once more with feeling 137
The undoing of the double: Nabokov’s Despair 138
Contents ix
The shadow of a doubt: postmodern fiction 139

Schwarzenegger and de Vito, and other unlikely 144
lookalikes
Adaptation (Spike Jonze): Adapting twins 147
Doubtful, dubious and doubting 149
Everything old is new again: repetition and adaptation 152
Reviving the double 157
8 Conclusion: Twins and Problems of Representation 158

Feminist diversions 158
Diverting comedy: Angela Carter’s Wise Children 159
Diverting romance: Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God 160
Diverting adventure: Marilyn Bowering’s Visible Worlds 161
The insistent retelling of twin tales 162
Afterword 166
Notes 168
Bibliography 181
Filmography 190
Index 192
List of Illustrations
Figure 3.1 Aidan Quinn plays Jonathan and James McEwan 63

in Lies of the Twins
Figure 4.1 Belial in Basket Case 1 72
Figure 4.2 Conjoined twins Lenny (Vincent Schiavelli) and
Leonard in the ‘Humbug’ episode of The X-Files 76
Figure 7.1 Nicolas Cage plays twins Charlie (seated) and 153
Donald Kaufman in Adaptation
x
Acknowledgements
This project has spanned several institutional affiliations. It would

never have reached completion without a research fellowship from the
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queens-
land (Australia), which offered not only time away from teaching, but
a quality research environment. My special thanks to Graeme Turner,
Andrea Mitchell and Mark McLelland.
At the time I joined the Contemporary Studies programme at the
Ipswich campus of the University of Queensland, the project consisted
of a collection of disparate research papers, and I particularly wish to
thank Leigh Dale for the opportunity and encouragement to draw
these lines of enquiry together into the present book.
The project started during a postdoctoral fellowship in the then
Department of Romance Languages at the same university, and I am
grateful to many colleagues there for feedback in seminars and on
drafts, for research assistance, and for providing a stimulating intellec-
tual environment: to Peter Cryle, who offered invaluable advice on
drafts and on the orientation of the book, to Peter Cowley, Anne
Freadman, Joe Hardwick, Diana Jones and James Wheatley; to Ross
Chambers when he was Visiting Fellow; and above all to Bronwyn
Statham for research assistance that culminated in the co-authorship of
Chapters 3 and 4. Barbara Hanna, my research partner on another
project, has most generously lent an intelligent ear and eye to this one.
The research for Chapters 3 and 4 was supported by an Australian
Research Council Small Grant. Earlier versions of Chapters 3, 6, 2 and 4
were published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies
12 (3) 1998 (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals); Essays in French Liter-
ature (38) 2001; AUMLA (97) 2002, and Scope: An Online Journal of Film
Studies (November) 2004, and in each case reviewers made constructive
suggestions that were implemented. My thanks to these journals for
permission to reproduce material and to the editorial team at Palgrave
and their readers for further useful advice.
The 1997 conferences of the Australian Society for French Studies
and of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Associ-
ation provided a sounding board for the project in its early stages,
and contributors to the Balzac-L discussion list offered thoughtful
suggestions for the corpus.
xi
xii Acknowledgements
Finally, I would like to thank the following for granting permis-

sion to reproduce film stills in this book: Universal Studios, Frank
Henelotter, Umbrella Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Televi-
sion, and Columbia Pictures Industries Inc.
And to Guy for listening and sharing in so many ways, and to
Caroline and François for defying narrative patterns and providing
a welcome distraction from the project, thank you.
Introduction
My children are twins, and acquaintances often imagine that this book
was prompted by their arrival. Far from it: the book was conceived well
before they were, and early versions of some chapters had already
appeared as conference papers before my twins made an appearance
with two banana-shaped patches on the pregnancy scan. Rather their
arrival proves the dangers of becoming too absorbed in a research
project: it really does colonise your life. As my colleague Peter Cowley
exclaimed at the news: ‘Just as well you weren’t studying stories of
abduction by aliens…’
In fact the seeds of the book were sown in the early 1980s, in work
for an honours dissertation, when I struggled to find non-dialectical
narratives about same-sex couples, that is, stories in which the pair was
not largely defined by an opposition between characters. The search
led me to Michel Tournier’s novel Gemini, and to the suspicion that
narrative punishment was meted out to characters that chose a partner
too like themselves. Other projects – academic and personal – inter-
vened, and it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that I returned to a version of
this question, with a rather different approach. Its pursuit evolved into
what is now Chapter 2, on surviving sameness.
In the course of my hunt for stories of resemblance, I collected a
corpus of contemporary tales of twins and doubles and was astounded
by the vast number and variety of films, novels, newspaper articles and
documentaries about twins, and by the fact that certain stories were
being told over and over again. Why, I asked myself, are there such
clusters of texts that tell of the stranglehold of brotherly love, of the
evil twin who steals her sister’s lover, of the homicidal mutant twin, of
the reunion of twins separated at birth, of twins divided by warring
nations, of confusion between lookalike twins? Why do these stories
xiii
xiv Introduction
need to be retold now and how they are being transformed in the
telling? What do our narrative uses of twins reveal about contemporary
culture?
Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture addresses these ques-
tions. Clearly, twins are being used to work through some important
preoccupations, some quite specific to late twentieth-century culture.
In particular, some of the most insistent retelling of twin tales today
uses twins to explore questions of gender and sexuality. Other sets of
stories relate to new ways of thinking about national and personal
identity. I make no claim to exhausting the cultural uses made of twins
(there is no limit to the ways in which twins can be harnessed by the
imagination!), preferring to concentrate on some particularly revealing
storytelling habits.
Chapter 1 outlines the scope of the study and offers a theoretical
framework for studying both the diversity and repetition of twin tales.
Rejecting the premise that there is a single, underlying meaning to the
appearance of twins in our storytelling, it proposes an analysis in terms
of particular conjunctions of gender and genre rather than treating
twins as a unified thematic. Twins are used for different purposes in
different narrative genres. While they are equally available to provide
intrigue in horror, comedy, crime and romance, they tend not to fulfil
the same function in each case. They do not provide a single key
to contemporary culture but multiple entry points. The chapter also
situates the book in relation to various existing studies of twins and
doubles, challenging critical work that suggests that twentieth-century
narratives represent the decline into triviality of a great Romantic
theme. On the contrary, the examples studied throughout the book
attest to innovation and vitality in the refashioning of twin tales for
new audiences.
Chapters 2 to 7 each offer a reading of a particular concentration of
twin tales, before analysing in detail a story that attempts to shift a
repeated pattern. Chapter 2 (‘Twins and the Couple’) explores the
difficulty of surviving sameness in twin narratives, for outside comic
genres, stories of twins and doubles are short on survivors. This is not
only the case in tales of deadly rivalry between good and evil twins,
but also in stories of twins as soul-mates, partners in life, whose rela-
tionship of resemblance dooms them to sink into stagnation and
perish. Tales of the death of soul-mate twins have been pervasive in
Western imaginative discourses throughout the last century, crossing
cultures and genres, and harking back to the myth of Narcissus and its
use by Freud to describe a pathological state. Clearly they reflect a
Introduction xv
moral imperative regarding our choice of partners, yet there are good
reasons for wanting to tell other, less lethal stories about couples
defined by their resemblance. In a reading of three novels relating
the life of male twins who form a couple – Patrick White’s The Solid
Mandala (1966), Michel Tournier’s Les Météores (1975), and Bruce
Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (1982) – this chapter investigates the poss-
ibility of telling such stories differently. The twins in each case form
a same-sex couple who must negotiate the pitfalls of narcissism.
The unfolding of these narratives resonates with the development of
contemporary discourses of gay identity, and points to a rethinking of
what constitutes a viable relationship. If coupledom has traditionally
been understood as a synthesis of differences into oneness, the novels
allow us to glimpse its reconception as a relation in which sameness
and difference are mutually entailing.
Chapter 3 (‘Twins and Sexual Rivalry’) turns to female twins, rare in
literary history but abundant in twentieth-century popular film, espe-
cially in the 1940s and 1990s. The overwhelming majority of these
films are thrillers involving deadly rivalry over a man between good
and evil identical twin sisters. Moreover, these sisters are always
split along the same predictable line – a version of the virgin/whore
dichotomy. What is it about this story that it still needs to be told so
frequently? How has it been reworked in the wake of the sexual re-
volution and feminism to appeal to a contemporary audience? And
why might we want to tell sister stories differently? Here it is revealing
to study a film that transposes gender in the tale of sexual rivalry. Like
so many twin sister films, Tim Hunter’s Lies of the Twins (1991) is a
story about jealousy between twins over a love interest, but in this
highly unusual case the virtuous fiancé and sex-driven homebreaker
are twin brothers. Viewing Lies of the Twins as a role reversal exposes
the cultural myths underlying female twin films and suggests strate-
gies for rethinking the dichotomy that continues to pervade them.
Twins may be commonly employed in film to incarnate the binary
oppositions that dominate our thinking, but this chapter shows that
they can also be used to question them.
If twin sister thrillers invariably work through fantasies of female
sexuality, post-1980 horror films featuring male conjoined twins also
impose a compulsory figure. Chapter 4 (‘Twins and the “Crisis of
Masculinity”’) takes a close look at films by Cronenberg, Romero
and Henenlotter together with a parody of the corpus in The X-Files
to demonstrate the systematic representation of this twin relation
as maternal. At a time of destabilisation of traditional masculine
xvi Introduction
identities, conjoined twins in the horror genre provide an ideal oppor-

tunity to feminise the male body. Joined and disjoined, the brothers’
bodies are displayed as umbilically linked, and monstrously so. One
bond dating from the womb – twinship – is used to substitute for
another – the mother-child dyad – in a surprisingly consistent way.
This is but a recent pattern among twin films, and yet its strength is
evident when we find the theme of maternity surfacing in conjoined
twin films in genres other than horror. The Polish brothers’ Twin Falls
Idaho (1999, ‘a different kind of love story’) is a case in point: unable
simply to ignore this convention, it is obliged continually to deflect it.
The examples point to a highly specific cultural use of twins at the
close of the twentieth century.
The focus on gender continues in Chapter 5 (‘Twins and the “Gay
Gene” Debate’), which examines two very different uses of twins to
talk about sexual identity: twin studies research on homosexuality and
queer comic fiction in the shape of Robert Rodi’s Drag Queen (1995), a
gay parody of long-lost twin tales. While the former uses twins to
engage in the nature/nurture debate over homosexuality (revitalised
by media interest in the ‘gay gene’ hypothesis), the latter rewrites the
very terms of this debate. Drag Queen rehearses a timeworn tale – twins
separated at birth are reunited – to unsettle the gay/straight, male/
female binaries underpinning the twin studies. Gay lawyer Mitchell
and flamboyant entertainer Kitten Caboodle may be identical twins,
but are far from exactly alike. Their story illustrates the problems with
categorising sexual orientation in an either/or fashion – either hetero-
sexual or homosexual – as twin studies tend to do. And it questions the
usefulness of understanding identity in terms of either a core of being
or self-invention. As such the novel serves as a commentary not only
on debates about heredity and environment, but on current tensions
in ways of conceiving of identity.
The extensive use of twins to depict fissures in national, ethnic or
cultural identity is the focus of Chapter 6 (‘Twins and Nations’).
The tradition goes back to ancient myths of the founding of cities
and civilisations by rival twins such as Romulus and Remus, Jacob
and Esau, and reflects the perennial conflicts dividing peoples.
Unlike these legends of fraternal twins, twentieth-century narratives
of such conflicts most commonly feature identical twins: the ‘broth-
erhood of nations’ is represented in terms of an underlying sameness
beneath superficial cultural differences, whether in Cold War Europe
or across the India/Pakistan border. The assumption of resemblance
as the basis for harmonious relations between cultures is, however,
Introduction xvii
problematic in a postcolonial world of hybrid identities and multi-

ethnic nations. This can be seen in Marie-Thérèse Humbert’s novel
A l’autre bout de moi (1979), in which the twinship of Creole sisters
reflects the cultural tensions dividing the island of Mauritius. Here
conflicting discourses of subjectivity put the twins’ resemblance in
doubt, and in doing so allow a glimpse of a more sophisticated
concept of cultural identity, based on shifting identifications rather
than common traits. Surveying together the uses of twins to tell
tales of nations shows shifting understandings of the origins of
communal strife and the preconditions for peace.
Chapter 7 (‘Twins as Doubtful Doubles’) focuses on two instances in
which twins and doubles are openly mocked as hackneyed narrative
devices, and yet are simultaneously used to create a highly innovative
novel in one case, screenplay in the other. When, in Nabokov’s novel
Despair (1965), Hermann Karlovitch meets his own spitting image, a
perfect double he could kill in order to claim his own life insurance, the
catch is that he alone can see the resemblance. A parody of literature of
the double, the novel is widely regarded as a symptom of its decline.
However Nabokov’s joke can be seen to herald the emergence of a dis-
tinctly postmodern discourse of the double in which likeness is uncertain
and subjective, a discourse evident in novels by Amis, Auster, Kristof and
Monette, and in films by Fassbinder and Buñuel, with perhaps the most
memorable incarnation of the unlikely lookalike being Danny de Vito
and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Reitman’s Twins (1988). Despair thus
represents a moment of newness as much as a reckoning with the past.
Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) is a twin film that sheds light on this
process of repetition and renewal. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman puts
himself in the film together with a fictional identical twin brother,
and plays ironically with the notions of triteness and novelty in self-
referential commentary on cinematic ploys and clichés. If the twin plot is
predictable, its grafting on to the film adaptation of a botanical study
is not. The ironic quotation and recontextualisation of the twin motif
exemplifies a postmodern approach to originality. The film thus explicitly
engages with questions underlying the various narrative uses of twins
explored in this book, asking what is entailed in retelling a familiar tale,
and how it can be put to new purposes. It makes us wonder whether
identical twins themselves, in their sameness-and-difference, might not
serve as a contemporary metaphor for creativity.
The final section (Chapter 8 ‘Twins and Problems of Representation’)
brings the threads of discussion together. It starts by sketching parallels
between some rather disparate twin tales by Angela Carter, Margaret
xviii Introduction
Laurence and Marilyn Bowering. Each uses twins to disturb the genea-
logical line and question notions of legitimacy. This pattern mirrors the
unruly history of twin tales, which takes multiple directions across a wide
variety of genres, and never more so than in the late twentieth century.
The clusters identified throughout the book do not indicate one persis-
tent theme or a single overriding meaning for the profusion of twin tales
in contemporary culture. They do however point to a concentration
of cultural energy in certain domains. Unlike earlier manifestations, con-
temporary twin tales tend not to evoke questions of righteousness, the
duality of man, or the relation between material and spiritual dimen-
sions. Instead their focus is more often directed towards questions of
gender, relationships and identity – whether personal, cultural or sexual.
These emphases are unsurprising when we note the obsession with
the refashioning of the self in an era of hyper-individualism, and when
we consider the importance, in Western cultures, of debates over
gender roles, the redefinition of the family, sexualities and the hybridi-
sation of national cultures at the close of the twentieth century. The
question remains as to why twins stand out as a particularly appropri-
ate figure to embody these issues. Is it merely because twins are readily
available as metaphors for the self in conflict, for the couple, for any
duality? Here we might look to theory, for it is hardly coincidental that
the motifs of doubling and repetition have figured prominently in psy-
choanalytical and philosophical discourses during the last half-century.
The elaboration of Freud’s legacy by Jacques Lacan led to the ‘split
subject’ being seen as the norm of selfhood rather than the exception.
Gilles Deleuze pointed to repetition as the key to understanding differ-
ence. Jacques Derrida explained self-presence – the notion that one
is present and identical to oneself – as an illusion created by the
infinitesimal discrepancy in time and space between instances of
the self. More recently, Judith Butler has theorised gender identity as
an effect produced by the reiterative performance of gender roles.
Tales of identical twins usefully foreground questions of reiteration and
splitting, and thus provide an ideal opportunity to explore these concep-
tual shifts, which underlie the questions relating to identity and differ-
ence raised in some of the chapters. No less important than this
theoretical dimension, however, are the specific problems of representa-
tion that twins are used to address: how to depict soul-mate relationships,
the ideal woman, bodies that inspire horror, homosexual stereotypes,
ethnic tensions, the writer. In each case, the insistent repetition of a given
twin tale indicates a cultural hotspot, a point at which the desire to tell
the same story again confronts the need to tell it differently.
1
Look Twice: Narrative Uses of Twins
At first glance: a profusion of twin tales, a multitude of

meanings
Twin tales are told and retold with astonishing frequency in contempo-
rary culture. Newspapers give front-page prominence to accounts of the
birth or surgical separation of conjoined babies, to twins dying of simul-
taneous heart attacks or bicycle accidents, to twins in crime and twins in
sport. The reunion of twins separated at birth and the coincidences that
mark their lives are the subject of feature articles and television docu-
mentaries. Scientific journals tell stories of twins raised apart and twins
raised together. And these are only the tales that claim factual status.
Narratives of twins also abound in all manner of imaginative creations.
They populate short and feature films in the genres of comedy, drama,
thriller, horror, sci-fi, porn, film noir, children’s films, action and auteur
cinema, and appear regularly in fiction ranging from police procedural
novels to picaresque historical volumes, from the Bildungsroman to
lesbian satire, from Booker Prize winners to supermarket romance
novels.
In addition to these public genres of story-telling, twin tales are
recounted in conversation. As a frantic mother of new-born twins,
venturing out with the double stroller, I was constantly treated to
anecdotes and life histories of twins from complete strangers. The
author Michel Tournier recounts similar experiences and puts them
down to the mythic nature of twin tales:
A myth is a story that everyone already knows. When I was writing

Gemini I replied to those who enquired about the subject of my next
novel: it’s the adventures of two absolutely identical twin brothers.
1
2 Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture
At once my interlocutor’s face would light up. Twin brothers? As a

matter of fact, he knew some! Two identical brothers. When one
caught a cold in London, the other sneezed in Rome. How many
times did I hear that kind of anecdote! It was pointless for me to
go into the details of my project. People knew them already, and
recited them to me in advance. I congratulated myself: it was proof
that my subject was of a mythological nature. (Tournier, 1977:
189, original italics, my translation)
If Tournier’s point is that a myth is a story that is always already

known, he demonstrates that it is also a story that demands constant
retelling. What is it about twins that fascinates us to the point that we
are prepared endlessly to rehearse tales of intertwined lives? Are we
merely repetitive, even compulsively so? Twins in Contemporary Litera-
ture and Culture examines recent novels and films featuring twins. It
takes a second look at stories that at first seem familiar, that appear to
be already known (evil twin steals lover; stranglehold of brotherly love,
and so on), and asks why they need to be retold and how they are
transformed in recent retellings.
It would be convenient to find a single answer to these questions, to
find that these stories all ultimately come down to the same underly-
ing issue. Indeed over the years several critics have done so, regarding
twins as a subset of the figure of the double which they see as repre-
senting either the narcissistic defense of the ego (Rank, first published
1914), the projection of the unconscious (Tymms, 1949), an attempt to
cope with mental conflict (Rogers, 1970), the second self embodying
the quest for self-realisation (Keppler, 1972), the refusal of the real
(Rosset, 1976) or the incomplete self (Hallam, 1982).
It is not by chance that these studies of literary doubles are predomi-
nantly psychoanalytical: the topic of twins and doubles appears made
to order for a psychoanalytical reading, with its easy links to the mirror
stage, narcissism, the uncanny, separation anxiety, sibling rivalry, the
false self, projection of the unconscious, and exteriorisation of inner
conflict. Yet, too often, relying on the explanatory power of psycho-
analysis allows the reader to ignore its story-telling side, to overlook
the following kind of yarn – exemplary in its modelling of aspects of
the fairy-tale:
I once knew two twin brothers, both of whom were endowed

with strong libidinal impulses. One of them was very successful
with women, and had innumerable affairs with women and girls.
Look Twice 3
The other went the same way at first, but it became unpleasant for
him to be trespassing on his brother’s preserves, and, owing to the
likeness between them, to be mistaken for him on intimate occa-
sions; so he got out of the difficulty by becoming homosexual. He
left the women to his brother, and thus retired in his favour.
(Freud, 1953–74 Vol. 18: 159)
The anecdote appears in a footnote to one of Freud’s case studies. The

‘once’ (upon a time), the opposition of sexual options, and the pro-
minence of fraternal rivalry, confusion in amorous encounters, and
renunciation lend the anecdote as much to literary analysis (along-
side George Sand’s La Petite Fadette for example) as to psychoanalyti-
cal. Narratives of twins and doubles are not confined to incidental
footnotes and case studies in psychoanalytical texts: consider Freud’s
account of the child’s libidinal development and nostalgia for the
lost mother that underpins his theory of primary narcissism (Freud,
1953–74, Vol. 14: 73–102), Lacan’s tale of the toddler’s jubilation
before the mirror (1977) and Dolto’s of his sorrow (1987). A whole
series of stories is constituted by Dolto’s reworking of Lacan’s rewrit-
ing of Freud’s retelling of Ovid’s tale of Narcissus. Rather than view-
ing these as master patterns determining cultural discourses across
time, it is possible to regard them instead as narratives in their own
right, equally worthy of textual attention. 1 With their own specific
genre conventions, they circulate in parallel and even converge with
literary and popular discourses at particular moments in history. A
classic example is the intersection of late Romantic prose fiction and
the rise of psychoanalysis: moral and medical discourses mingle with
the supernatural to produce Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde or Poe’s ‘William Wilson,’ stories that anticipate the
development of theories of the unconscious. Here cultural produc-
tion finds itself remarkably in tune with the theoretical develop-
ments of the time, but as we shall see, this is not the only occasion of
complicity between theoretical and literary (or filmic) discourses.
The chapters that follow will therefore look to psychoanalysis less
for catch-all explanations than for further evidence of patterns in
story-telling habits.
The meaning of twins (or doubles, or mirrors, or shadows, or fission,
or fusion, or repetition, or the number two), like all meaning, is situa-
tion specific. Anne Freadman demonstrates this apropos of coiffure:
the cutting of hair cannot simply be taken as a symbol of castration,
as Freud suggests (Freud, 1953–74 Vol. 11: 96, Vol. 21: 157), but
acquires meanings particular to times and places. If cutting off one’s

tresses could signify self-mutilation in 1869 (Freadman, 2001: 225), by
the 1920s ‘the haircut had lost its power to act as a sacrifice or a loss,
or even as an aggressive act in a private sexual dynamic. It had
become a style, a fashion, a rule of conformity’ (226). A parallel argu-
ment can be made regarding twins in cultural production. Identical
and conjoined twins offer counter-intuitive images of one being in
two bodies and two beings in one body, and thus may be seen to lend
themselves to explorations of the nature of the self. However there is
seemingly no limit to the cultural purposes to which twins can be put.
Pressed into the service of the imagination, twins can be used to
signify not only the unconscious, the divided self, narcissistic love,
death, and fear of sexuality, but also the nation, the couple, fertility,
eroticism, chance, life choices, uncertain paternity, writing, reality
versus image, monstrosity, race relations, sexual difference, indeed
any kind of difference, any figure of the Other (another ethnicity,
gender, class, sexuality) and any duality, and to explore nature/
nurture debates in any field.
The present book, then, refuses to regard the profusion of literary/
filmic twins as the symptom of a single deep-seated anxiety that carries
across genres and eras. It will arrive at no single answer as to why twin
tales are so insistently retold. For although the coherence of the topic of
twins at first appears a given, a second look at the corpus reveals that this
is not a unified topos.2 Stories of twins are remarkable not only for their
number and frequency, but for their diversity. Identical, non-identical,
conjoined, mutant, telepathic, homicidal, buddies, tricksters, soul-mates,
long-lost siblings or jealous rivals, twins populate stories that may share
very little in terms of plot, character, genre and audience. Consider, from
1990s films, the Jackie Chan vehicle Twin Dragons alongside Michael
and Mark Polish’s Twin Falls Idaho, or, from novels of the same decade,
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things together with Patricia Corn-
well’s From Potter’s Field, Danielle Steel’s Mirror Image and Bryce Cour-
tenay’s Tommo and Hawk. The stories available are not variations on a
theme, but a whole variety concert.
A closer look: family resemblances
Amidst this apparently infinite variety, however, insistent patterns

occur. Just as in nineteenth-century prose fiction the frequent appear-
ance of the uncanny (invariably male) double anticipates the rise of
psychoanalytical theories of the unconscious, so patterns peculiar to
Look Twice 5
contemporary culture emerge. A set of late twentieth-century novels

recounts the shared life/death of soul-mate twins and suggests that cul-
tural energy is being directed into redefining what constitutes a viable
couple. A crop of early 1990s thriller films uses twin sisters to rework a
particular myth of female sexuality, rewriting the virgin/whore dicho-
tomy – without however abandoning it – for an audience less con-
vinced of the value of virginity. Post 1980s horror films portray the
relation between conjoined twin brothers as maternal, feminising
the male body at a time when masculine identities are in crisis.
Multiple research papers in behavioural genetics use twins to inquire
into the causes of homosexuality as it ceases to be viewed as pathologi-
cal. Phantom twins represent the divisions of Iron Curtain Europe in
film and fiction as communist regimes are about to fall, pointing to an
elusive relation between a Cold War East and West that do not simply
mirror each other. Tales of twins raised apart highlight the underlying
sameness of cultures in conflict with one another and testify to a belief
in the superficiality of cultural difference. Meanwhile postmodern
twins question the very notions of sameness and difference as they slip
in and out of resemblance with each other.
Clearly twins do not have the same meaning in each of the clusters
identified: they are not called upon to do the same representational
work in horror films as in research papers; and female twins and mixed
sex twins are not put to the same narrative purposes as male twins.
Yet within each cluster, representations are surprisingly consistent. In
other words, regularities tend to appear as a function of genre and
gender.
If we compare these sets of texts to patterns in the nineteenth-
century literature of the double, the divergence in preoccupations is
noticeable. The dualities are different. Gone are the theological over-
tones, the exploration of the relation between material and spiritual
worlds, in favour of a concentration on more human relationships.
The moral dimension is muted and the social amplified. Contemporary
twin tales converge around questions of gender and identity, whether
personal, cultural or sexual. A comparison at this very broad level,
however, can only lead to the most general of conclusions regarding
the changes wrought by a turbulent century. More revealing are
the cultural battles being fought out over more specific issues – over
understandings of the couple, the ideal woman, the male body, gay
identity, national identity, the creative self – tussles represented by
particular patterns among twin tales and the challenges to them. These
are the focus of the chapters that follow.
The book examines the tensions played out in contemporary narra-

tives of twins and doubles (insofar as the latter overlap with twin
tales) in literature and popular culture. It eschews study of a pre-
sumed general theme of twins in favour of analysing distinct sets of
recurring twin tales and their significance. Innovations occur from
time to time in the retellings, and the chapters linger on texts that
depart from familiar tales in some way to see what is at stake, why a
particular story needs to be retold differently, what pressures it is
under. These are extremely useful texts for identifying cultural
hotspots and crises of representation, for the innovations attest both
to the difficulty of shifting narrative habits and to the importance of
doing so.
The book does not attempt to cover the full range of recent twin
tales but concentrates on some particularly compelling interventions
in narrative routines. The first such intervention (Chapter 2) concerns
the survival of the twin couple: against tradition, the twins in Bruce
Chatwin’s On the Black Hill overcome the threats to their relationship
and survive together to the age of eighty. In Chapter 3, Tim Hunter’s
Lies of the Twins challenges the conventions of thriller films by dividing
men rather than women in terms of sexual activity. In Chapter 4,
the Polish brothers’ film Twin Falls Idaho struggles to portray the per-
meable male body other than as an object of horror and a violation of
gender boundaries. Robert Rodi’s comic novel Drag Queen turns the
tables on twin research in Chapter 5, defying the belief that homosex-
uality could represent a single category of sexual identity. In Chapter 6,
a novel of Creole twins in Mauritius, Marie-Thérèse Humbert’s A l’autre
bout de moi, allows us to glimpse an understanding of cultural identity
that is not dependent on resemblance among members of a culture.
And Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation, in Chapter 7, uses twins to question
prevailing myths of creativity and divisions between high and low
culture. Each of these texts puts a new twist on a familiar twin tale, and
in doing so, resists a received idea of identity or of relationships.
Genre and gender: twinned constraints

A close look at each cluster of twin tales reveals that they tend to be
highly coherent in terms of genre and gender, to the point where the
representation of twins of a given gender (such as female) in a given
genre (such as thriller films) seems to lend itself to the rehearsal of
a certain cultural concern (such as fidelity), virtually imposing a
particular tale, hence that feeling of having read or seen it all before.
The stories accorded detailed attention in this book are those that put
Look Twice 7
pressure on these familiar nexuses of genre, gender and topos to

transform existing models.
Critical work linking genre and gender has proliferated since
the early 1970s (Eagleton, 2000: 250), primarily linking the gender of
the author and the choice of genre. My study considers another point
of intersection: the genre conventions giving rise to gendered pat-
terns of representation in twin tales. Although this line of enquiry is
distinct from a focus on the gender of the author, the two are not
unrelated: obviously the gender of the author has a bearing on
the choice of gender (and exploits) of characters, the genre of the
narrative and its purpose. It is far from incidental, for example, that
when Marilyn Bowering raises the spectre of twin brothers firing at
each other from enemy aircraft in Visible Worlds, her story refuses to
conform to the ‘boys’ own’ template and offers an alternative tale of
female endurance and lost children. Neither is it by chance that the
representation of twin sisters as one virginal and one voracious is
found most consistently in films directed and produced from within
the predominantly masculine structures of the studio system.
The focus on the intersection of gender and genre highlights the nar-
rative habits that shape the retelling of twin stories. It enables us to ask
how gender representations are called into question by shifts in genre
and, conversely, how generic conventions are challenged by shifts in
gender. And it allows questions to be raised regarding, for example, the
representation of masculinity in horror movies and the fact that female
twins are found in such a narrow range of film genres. In this way, rather
than providing sociological explanations of change, I will be grounding
my readings in intertextual networks (literary/filmic traditions) and
accounting for textual innovation in terms of the manipulation of genre
constraints and of the representations they support.
Such an investigation requires underpinning by a theory that consid-
ers genre to be under constant renegotiation. Freadman and Mac-
donald’s work questions traditional ideas of genre as fixed models of
textual production. In their detailed exposition of the concept and uses
of genre, they argue that genres are not simply sets of rules. Rather
they take form as ‘regularities of practice, subject to deliberate modifi-
cation on occasion,’ yet with the inertia of ingrained habit (1992: 9).
These regularities give rise to reader expectations that are crucial in
determining not only interpretation but the production of further
examples of a genre. And among these are gender expectations. One of
the ways in which a text may address genre-related expectations is
through ‘not-statements’: texts position and define their genre by
invoking and explicitly distancing themselves from neighbouring

genres (Freadman, 1988). The novels and films studied in the chapters
that follow provide numerous examples of such self-positioning
against the patterns of particular genres, in order to shift certain stories
as they are retold.
Exhausting twins
The chapters outlined above make no claim to an exhaustive explo-
ration of contemporary narrative uses of twins and doubles. Firstly the
clusters of texts chosen, while not always culturally specific, are limited
to those that engage with a Western tradition: the occasional European
art-house film finds its way into an overwhelmingly North-American
corpus of films; anglophone and francophone novels are studied
against the background of a wider European tradition. The wealth of
narrative material from non-Western societies, from indigenous and
other Asian, African, Pacific and South American cultures, brought to
light by ethnologists and scholars of religion, has not been examined
(and the ‘Twins’ issue [1994: Vol. 19: 2] of the journal of myth and
tradition, Parabola, gives an idea of the scale of such a venture).
Secondly, even within the cultural limits I have set myself, the sheer
volume of twin tales published annually precludes assembly of a
comprehensive corpus.
It would nonetheless be possible to identify and study further pat-
terns of twin tales: in action films for example, in pornographic film
and literature, in detective fiction, in science-fiction, in reports of legal
cases, in tales of incest, in tales of twins as authors, in children’s lite-
rature, or in Booker Prize winners set in India. The very notion of
exhausting the topic, however, runs counter to the thrust of the book.
The possibility of accounting for twin tales as a whole presupposes the
idea that they constitute a unified topos, an idea that I challenge.
Aiming for exhaustiveness would mean marking out the limits of con-
temporary narrative uses of twins, whereas I argue that there are no
structural or imaginative limits to potential uses, but that each applica-
tion will involve the negotiation of discursive habits, the manipulation
of generic conventions established to a greater or lesser degree. Despite
the recurrence of particular narrative routines, twin tales are continu-
ally mutating: each repetition offers the opportunity for difference;
each new text has the potential to revise a template. There is thus no
reason why twins could not be harnessed in film, fable or front-page
report to represent, say, weather patterns (Tournier’s Les Météores pro-
vides a foretaste), the nature of writing (as in John Barth’s Sabbatical),
Look Twice 9
technological change (the link between the double and the machine is
a longstanding one, see Coates, 1998: 2), or worker alienation (Fight
Club comes close). In order to do so, however, there is a need to ack-
nowledge and deal with an accumulation of pre-existing stories that
together exert a certain pressure to conform.
The chapters, then, do not constitute a typology of twin tales – struc-
tural or thematic – in the manner of the studies by Keppler (1972),
Dolezêl (1985), and even Doniger (2000). Part of the delight of
the texts I have chosen to study in detail is the way in which they are
untrue to type, and refuse to be typecast. Rather than adopting the
restraining and unifying model of a typology, where the focus is on
the typical, each chapter pays close attention to a text where a given
formula is in flux. Topography might be a more useful model, in that it
involves detailed description of localities. Twins in Contemporary Litera-
ture and Culture is self-consciously selective, investigating loci where
late twentieth-century twin stories proliferate, looking out for changes
in the landscape, and explaining these shifts in terms of the interre-
lation of gender, genre and topos. Chapters therefore have a dual
emphasis, demonstrating not only recurrence but variation, exploring
both the conventions that shape twin tales in various genres, and the
points at which these constraints are strained. This reflects the double
imperative driving the retelling of twin tales: there is the need to tell
these stories again, and the need to tell them differently.3
Looking back: existing studies of twins and doubles
Important studies of twins and doubles in myth and literature,

not only from literary disciplines but also from the fields of anthro-
pology, ethnology, psychology and religion, appear at intervals to
span the entire twentieth century: from Rendel Harris’s 1903 volume,
The Dioscuri in the Christian Legend, through Otto Rank’s psychoana-
lytic study (1914)4 and Ralph Tymms’s psychological one (1949), a
spate of texts in the 1970s and 1980s, to the recent massive tomes by
Hillel Schwartz (1996) and Wendy Doniger (2000). So why do we need
another one? The short answer is the scarcity of detailed work devoted
to more recent twin narratives, and presumptions by a number of
critics that twentieth-century doubles are somehow less interesting
than or merely derivative of earlier representations. The short answer
does not, however, do justice to the work that has been done and on
which this book builds, so the remainder of this introductory chapter
will be devoted to an examination of existing studies, their scope,
their usefulness, in some cases their limitations, and the ways in

which this book departs from them.
Although my project focuses specifically on twin tales, studies of
doubles are highly relevant to it, since at various points in time, certain
topoï of twins and the theme(s) of the double have been intertwined.5
This is certainly the case in the late twentieth century, confirm-
ing Stewart’s social research, which highlights the Anglo-American
tendency to associate twinship above all with notions of identical
appearance and behaviour (2003: 119–25, 157–60). In the present
study, the twin as double looms large in the third, fifth, sixth and
seventh chapters, although it scarcely figures in the second and fourth
chapters, which explore other relations between twins. This contrast is
consistent with René Zazzo’s analysis in Le Paradoxe des jumeaux. Zazzo
distinguishes between the theme of the double and that of the couple
in narrative uses of twins (1984: 81–2, 160), and shows that the pre-
dominance of one or other of these two themes in twin tales varies at
different historical moments. Coates distinguishes between twins and
doubles in a different way. He suggests that ‘[w]hereas twins are staple
figures of comic literature, which feeds on the confusions their similar-
ity generates, the Double recaptures the image of the twin for non-
comic literature: the Double is the emissary of death’ (1988: 3). While
this generalisation can be argued for much pre-twentieth-century liter-
ature (especially theatre), it is belied by the longstanding connection
between twins and death (explored in Chapter 2 below). Moreover, the
distinction is blurred in more recent texts, in which twins assume
many of the tropes of earlier doubles. Indeed, of the twins featured in
the present study, only one set is comic (Chapter 5). Twins and
doubles are, then, not interchangeable, but related to a greater or lesser
extent in particular periods and genres.
Several studies engage with the definition of the double, a vexing
issue given that almost any relation of resemblance and/or opposit-
ion may be used to identify a double. As Guerard notes, ‘[t]he word
double is embarrassingly vague, as used in literary criticism’ (1967: 3).
Although I shall evoke stories and studies of doubles where relevant, I
shall restrict my primary corpus to tales of twins for reasons of
economy and coherence.
If twins preoccupy the contemporary imagination, as their frequent
appearance in recent films and novels suggests, a survey of the litera-
ture shows that twins have prompted fear and fascination since mytho-
logical times. However, just as they have not necessarily played on the
same anxieties, or evoked the same laughter or yearnings in different
Look Twice 11
times, places and genres, neither have they been uniformly present
throughout history. Tales of twins and doubles are noticeably abun-
dant in myth and legend, in the theatre of antiquity, and at two
periods during modern times in Western literature: the seventeenth
and nineteenth centuries.
The contrast between their manifestations in these latter two periods
is sharp. In English Renaissance and French Classical theatre, twins
appear above all in comic theatre. Shakespeare and Molière find an
antecedent in the Greek comedies of Menander and the Roman plays
of Plautus. Exploiting the generic constraints and possibilities of play-
house performance, they stage comedies of confusion in which twins,
lookalikes and doubles (divine or mortal) substitute for one another in
amorous intrigues and are falsely accused of another’s misdeeds. Key
twin comedies are Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and A Comedy of Errors
(the latter based on Plautus’s Menaechmi) and Molière’s Amphitryon
(based on Plautus’s play of the same name). Then, after a relatively
idle period of a century or so, doubles (more often doppelgängers and
half-brothers mistaken for twins rather than twins per se) regain
prominence across Europe, tending to meet a tragic end in Romantic
and fin de siècle prose fiction and gothic novels (for example by Jean
Paul [Richter], Chamisso, Hoffmann, Hogg, Dostoevsky, Stevenson,
Maupassant), and in the work of Edgar Allan Poe in America.
Criticism follows suit, focusing primarily on these periods and
genres.6 Shakespeare’s twin comedies are often studied alongside his
plays featuring non-twin doubles (such as The Two Noble Kinsmen and
The Two Gentlemen of Verona), for example by Jean Perrot (1976), for
whom the double falls ‘sous le signe des jumeaux’ – under the sign of the
Gemini – as the title of his book suggests. However, if, for Perrot and
Zazzo, twins are the source of certain themes while doubles are the
reflecting image, for scholars of nineteenth-century literature, twins
represent a subset of the broader category of doubles. The Romantic era
is glorified as the ‘heyday’ of the double (Herdman, 1991: x; Tymms,
1949: 120) and twins are subsumed under this motif, which is viewed
as ‘a central theme’ of the period (Herdman, 1991: x). Consequently,
there is a great deal of criticism pertaining to nineteenth-century
doubles and in which the representation of twins is a secondary
concern.
In terms of the sheer number of narratives, twentieth-century twins
and doubles are more abundant than their predecessors, yet they are
often seen as a footnote to the history of the double. Although well-
served by Irwin’s (1975) analysis of Faulkner and Slethaug’s study of
postmodern American fiction (1993), twentieth-century doubles have

received scant attention in comparison with the concentrated focus on
nineteenth-century literature, and are in fact dismissed by some critics:
their lack of coherence is seen as evidence of the weakening of the
nineteenth-century theme, and their very proliferation is deemed a
trivialisation.
The double in decline

Tymms, in an admittedly dated study, frets over the trivialisation of
the double, which occurs, he argues, when the figure does not function
as a vehicle for psychological analysis (1949: 8, 109, 119). During its
Romantic apogee, on the other hand, the double was used to embody
the unconscious self. Rogers concurs with Tymms’s judgement and
similarly privileges the psychological. He valorises the ‘latent’ double
over the ‘manifest’ (which we may presume to include identical twins)
(1970: 4), and draws attention to the difficulties faced by post-Freudian
authors in ‘transcend[ing] the limitations of representing doubles in an
overt manner’ (1970: 162). It seems that they are almost obliged to
descend into self-parody, exemplified by Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair,
considered by Rogers as ‘ultimately not satisfying’ (Rogers, 1970: 171).
The object of Coates’s study is post-Romantic literature, but mostly
fin de siècle, with relatively few twentieth-century examples. Coates
echoes Tymms and Rogers when he writes of the predicament of suc-
cessors to Joseph Conrad and Henry James: ‘As the doctrines of Freud
become more widely known, however, the dividedness of the self
becomes a truism. Hence its representation becomes trivial […] and
ceases to carry any literary information’ (1988: 34–5). And in further
comment on the increasing banality of the figure, he suggests that ‘the
appearances of the Double made possible by film […] remove the
Double to the realm of technical trickery’ (1988: 35).
Herdman similarly shows nostalgia for the nineteenth century, and
in keeping with the discourse of fin de siècle decadence laments the
decline of the double: ‘The motif does not die with the nineteenth
century, but its treatment in the last decade shows it in a state of
declension from the fullest development of its potential’ (1991: x,
cf. 143, 145). Although he recognises that the double survives the turn
of the century with altered emphases, his thesis precludes the possibil-
ity that it might flourish. For if the vitality of the literature of the
double depends on the interpenetration of moral/spiritual and psycho-
logical discourses (x, 19, 145, 151), then, once again, post-Freudian
avatars are at a distinct disadvantage. Herdman too regrets the ‘relapse
Look Twice 13
of the double theme into comparative triviality’ at the close of the

nineteenth century (1991: 144).
In the light of these analyses, the abundance of twentieth-century
twin tales could perhaps be regarded as a response to the post-Freudian
limitations described: if representing psychological doubles openly has
become problematic, identical twins are a plausible substitute. They
can be shown to mirror each other overtly, and their mirroring can
embrace a moral perspective.
Meanwhile, if the theme of the double is considered to have become
hackneyed (Rogers, 1970: 2), the same can certainly be said of the oft-
repeated complaint of its twentieth-century trivialisation. Jonze’s film
Adaptation offers a less serious commentary on the perceived slide of
the double into triviality. It alludes self-reflexively to the status of the
double as a disreputable device of fiction (cf. Tymms, 1949: 15), with
its discriminating screenwriter protagonist fretting over the cinematic
clichés produced by his identical twin screenwriter brother who enjoys
popular success (see Chapter 7 below).
The bulk of the critical texts on the double, then, from Rank and
Tymms onward, reserves the place of honour for Romantic doubles,
often showing little sympathy for postmodern playfulness and seem-
ingly immune to the sway of poststructuralist discourses of identity.
This occurs even in quite recent criticism. In 1995, a flurry of analy-
ses was published to coincide with the setting of the double as the
topic for the French agrégation in literature (a national competitive
examination for entry to secondary and tertiary teaching posts).
The syllabus comprised texts by Hoffmann, Chamisso, Dostoevsky,
Maupassant and Nabokov. Nabokov, the only twentieth-century
representative, is seen from the outset as the one who ‘liquidated’
the theme (Troubetzkoy, 1995: 7). For Troubetzkoy, Nabokov’s text
marks ‘the fall of the empire of the double’ (Troubetzkoy, 1996: 189,
cf. 205), delivering the final blow to a once-great theme, in decline
since the end of the nineteenth century. Although he gestures
towards the double’s later productivity (1995: 17), citing Coates, he
stops short of elaborating on the directions this might take.
Coates is in fact ambiguous on this point, for he starts out suggest-
ing that ‘following the turn of the century the Double atrophied as a
literary trope’ before revising his thesis to the effect that the double
had assumed a new form, ‘that of the second-person pronoun’
(1988: 65), and briefly exploring this use. One of the rare critics to
argue explicitly against the discourse of decline is Hallam, who cites
and refutes Field’s comment that ‘[t]oday the theme has very few
advocates in literature […] and is generally regarded, with some

justice, as a quaint and curious chestnut of the Romantic era in
literature’ (Field, 1967: 220, cited Hallam, 1982: 11). Hallam points to
the use of the double by ‘innovative writers like Joyce, Mann, Kafka,
Woolf, Faulkner, and Borges,’ although he still attributes the success
of their inventions to the groundwork done by their nineteenth-
century predecessors (1982: 11). Similarly, Miller, whose book
includes a chapter on twins and discusses a number of twentieth-
century texts, views these examples through the prism of a
nineteenth-century ‘heritage of romantic duality’ (1985: 417,
cf. 29–38). Although he in no way dismisses contemporary doubles,
he sees continuity between them and their more exalted forebears:
‘Dualistic works of art […] continue to appear, and the new works
have done little to deny or efface the old’ (1985: 418).
It is curious to observe that many of these writings were published
in the years following a period when the figure of the double had
been not only ubiquitous but a tool of some leverage in literary
theory, under the impact of contemporary psychoanalytical theory
and philosophy. We need only think of the profound influence of
Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage (1977 [first published 1949]), with
its conception of the speaking subject as a divided unity, or of
Kristeva’s semiotic/symbolic divide through which she elaborated
the existence of an inaccessible otherness within the self (1984
[1974]), or of Derrida’s demonstration (with respect to citation) that
in order for something to be identical to itself, it must be able to be
repeated/duplicated (1982 [1971]: 307–30). Indeed Descombes
(1979) characterises modern French philosophy from Kojève to
Derrida and Deleuze as primarily concerned (like the double) with
problematising the opposition between sameness and otherness. 7
That literary uses of the double should continue their putative
decline at a time when the double attained such imposing status in
theoretical work is difficult to believe. There is every reason to
suppose that these theoretical breakthroughs were accompanied by
novels, plays and films in which the double figures in ways specific
to the close of the twentieth century, just as Maupassant’s and
Stevenson’s texts heralded Freud’s. Coates alludes to this – albeit
briefly and somewhat regretfully – when he writes of the contem-
porary social context in terms of multiple fissures within the self,
of entire series of reflecting surfaces, and of fragmented super-egos
that function to preclude the emergence of a solitary double
representing death, self-knowledge or self-betrayal (1988: 35).
Look Twice 15
Happily, Gordon Slethaug’s The Play of the Double in Postmodern

American Fiction (1993) pursues this argument in a sustained way.
Slethaug studies novels by Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes,
John Barth, Richard Brautigan, and Raymond Federman and relates
them to the poststructuralist rethinking of binary categories by Lacan,
Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva (19–30). He argues that the
postmodern literature of the double is distinguished by a move away
from the double’s ‘traditional dualistic moorings’ towards a new play-
fulness and an interrogation of ‘selfhood, language, and culture’ (197,
cf. 30). Postmodern authors are said to use the double to explore in
particular ‘a divided and discontinuous self in a fragmented universe,’
the constructed nature of human reality, and ‘the inevitable drift of
signifiers away from their referents,’ preoccupations that Slethaug sums
up as ‘the split sign, the split self, and the split text’ (3).
Slethaug’s book is important in providing the first full-length study of
the contemporary double in its own right, rather than as a leftover from
nineteenth-century fiction. To do so, Slethaug focuses on novels by
recognised American literary authors, but his thesis can be extended to
the work of writers such as Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Marie Redonnet
and Madeleine Monette (cf. Chapter 7 below). Whilst my study is related
in purpose to Slethaug’s, it approaches the question somewhat differ-
ently: firstly in examining twin tales, a corpus that intersects only par-
tially with that of the double; secondly in paying as much attention to
popular film and prose genres as to literary fiction; thirdly in looking for
clusters of similar tales, denoting a concentration of cultural energy
around certain questions; and fourthly – a consequence of the clusters
found – in foregrounding issues of gender.
Not a trifling matter

Two further studies of a less literary nature make valuable contribu-
tions to the field. Like Slethaug’s book, they neither mourn the passing
of a previous era nor dismiss late twentieth-century cultural production
as a poor relation. Moreover they do not consider popular culture a
trifling matter. Wendy Doniger (2000) juxtaposes B grade movies with
ancient and medieval sources in The Bedtrick, and Hillel Schwartz
(1996), in The Culture of the Copy, contemplates not only literary exam-
ples but rubber sex dolls and hair-perm and motorcycle advertisements
featuring twins. Both consider the supposedly trivial worthy of serious
attention and a sign of vigour rather than decline.
In contrast with Herdman, Schwartz affirms that the double has
remained a central theme – nay an obsession – in contemporary
culture, that it is at the root of ‘our most perplexing moral dilemmas’

(1996: 11). Living in the culture of the copy requires us to revise old
ideals of authenticity as singularity and (in a move reminiscent of
Derrida’s elaboration of différance) to conceive of an authenticity
defined by doubleness (Schwartz, 1996: 17). For in a world of multiple
copies without an original to anchor them, doubleness no longer
signifies duplicity. Schwartz’s postmodern eclecticism allows him to
analyse reproductions of all kinds, not just twins and doppelgängers,
self-portraits and store mannequins, but Warhol’s soup-cans, forgeries
and photocopies, placebos and prosthetics, fake flowers and flight sim-
ulators. Narratives are not the focus of this miscellany, but it nonethe-
less provides a useful entry point for understanding twin tales about
doubling and cloning.
Doniger’s book, on the other hand, is devoted to a particular set of
narratives, namely stories ‘of going to bed with someone whom you
mistake for someone else’ (2000: xiii). All of these concern doubles of
one sort or another, and many involve twins. Doniger organises her
vast corpus – drawing on Sanskrit texts, the Hebrew bible, Greek and
Latin literature, German and French stories, Hollywood films and
assorted other tales – according to plot and theme in a self-consciously
structuralist manner, in order to undertake a ‘broad comparative enter-
prise’ (xviii). She asks questions across eras, cultures and genres,
seeking if not universal meanings then at least ‘cross-cultural […]
meanings for the bedtrick as well as for the concepts of sex, love, and
knowledge that undergird it’ (xxi).
These two books are impressive quasi-encyclopaedic studies, and both
Schwartz and Doniger achieve the latter’s aims of delighting, demon-
strating a point, and dazzling with erudition (Doniger, 2000: xxvi–xxvii).
In each case there are partial overlaps with the questions driving this
book, in that twins as copies and as sexual usurpers appear in several
chapters. However, while Doniger and Schwartz draw attention to conti-
nuity in the recycling of motifs and themes, I point to rifts and shifts
that occur in retellings. The divergence of our aims comes back to that
double insistence driving the retelling of certain tales. Whereas Doniger
demonstrates the need to keep telling the same story, the ease with
which we resort to it, the continued sympathy for particular speaking
positions, I explore the difficulty of telling it differently, of diverging
from a persistent story-line. I ask what precisely is involved in some of
those shifts that Doniger accommodates as variants of the theme. This
requires lingering over some particularly telling retellings, not widely
studied elsewhere, over the detail of their differences.
Look Twice 17
Convergences of genre and gender

Although Doniger explores gender asymmetry in bedtrick stories, and
Herdman comments in parentheses that ‘sisters are a rarity’ in the
Romantic corpus (14), rarely are gender issues associated with genre in
the literature. Nonetheless, a small number of critics usefully link topos
to genre and gender in their studies of literary twins and doubles.
On the one hand there are insightful analyses of quite particular con-
junctions, usually with a feminist purpose. Joanne Blum notes that ‘the
tradition of the double has been largely a male one’ and that ‘the type of
double reflected in their texts is, almost without exception, a single-
sexed one’ (1988: 2). She describes the male/female double in nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century women’s fiction as an effort to transcend
traditional gender roles: ‘male and female selves overreach their cultur-
ally prescribed gender identities to relate to one another in such a way
that the boundary between self and other becomes blurred’ (1988: 1).
Valérie Raoul (1996), poring over a century of French-Canadian women’s
writing, brings together genre, gender and culture. She identifies a partic-
ular treatment of the female double in the genre of the fictitious diary
that overturns the novelistic tradition of the (male) double as a threat to
selfhood: a female narrator is able to mourn the death of a beloved
friend through continuing the writing she has left behind, and through
the resulting fusion of identities. A third example is Lucy Fischer’s analy-
sis of the representation of female twins in women’s melodrama
of the 1940s (1989: 172–215, discussed in Chapter 3 below). Such studies
do not attempt to account for the same range of twin tales as the present
one, but support its argument by providing further instances of a specific
articulation of genre and gender determining the representation of
twins.
On the other hand, some of the wider studies of twins and doubles
make more general links between genre and gender. Otto Rank details
some of the rich history of twins in myth and legend, in which rival
twins are linked to the founding of cities and civilisations, sometimes
tragically: Romulus and Remus, Zethus and Amphion, Jacob and Esau
(1973: 90–7). It is left to René Zazzo to note that these legendary twins
are invariably fraternal: both male and non-identical (1984: 143). Genre
and gender are further linked to topos when he explains the absence of
identical twins in myth by the fact that foundational myths use twins
to raise the question of social identity rather than personal identity or
singularity of being (1984: 83).
While Rank notes the frequency with which twins appear in come-
dies of confusion (1973: 89), Zazzo finds patterns in the genres and
periods in which non-identical and identical twins appear: ‘To find

identical twins in ancient literature we need to switch from tragedy to
comedy’ (1984: 155). He notes, however, that identical twins in nine-
teenth-century prose narratives rarely signal comedy, and are instead
used to represent themes earlier associated with non-identical twins
and the theme of the couple, such as jealousy or the mystic bond of
soul-mates till death. Zazzo interprets this as an elucidation of couple-
dom through exploration of the double (1984: 171). He also signals the
importance of incestuous mixed sex twins in nineteenth-century and
fin de siècle narratives (1984: 171), a topos that continues to flourish a
century later, a notable instance being Arundhati Roy’s breathtaking
The God of Small Things with its tale of ‘two-egg twins’ and forbidden
loves.
Perrot, however, goes furthest in using the concept of genre as an
organising principle in his study of twin tales. In following the ‘chain’
(1976: 9) of literary twins from Plautus to Poe, he describes the links of
the chain in terms of genre transformations. Submitting the myth
to the constraints of new genres has resulted in the reformulation of
those genres: ‘each particular text tends to subvert the model it has
adopted’ (1976: 14). Thus Charles Perrault bent Roman comedy to the
constraints of the popular children’s tale, where it assumed the peda-
gogical function formerly reserved for tragedy (1976: 11). Thus the use
of the double in Poe’s short stories represents the displaced obverse of
Shakespearian theatre (1976: 11, 217).
Perrot’s use of genre to explain the transformation of stories is pro-
ductive. Less useful, although perhaps predictable in a 1970s structural-
ist study that engages with the theoretical writings of the day, is the
premise of the unity and centrality of his object of study. The ‘myth of
twins’ is said to be singular and to occupy ‘a privileged position in the
cultural sphere of the Western world’ (1976: 7). If the myth represents
the backbone (‘l’axe vertebral,’ 1976: 7) of a binarised worldview, this
appears to be due to some kind of unchanging deep structure, flexible
perhaps but enduring. Perrot maintains that the twins myth has served
as the medium for genre transformation (1976: 13): although flexed to
fit new constraints, ‘the original matrix’ (1976: 218) remains constant.
The ‘chain’ of the myth’s existence is therefore necessarily linear and
continuous.
Like Perrot, I propose to use genre to explain some of the transforma-
tions in late twentieth-century (and later) twin tales, focusing on the
impact both of the choice of genre on the (re)telling of a story, and of
the particular story on generic conventions. Unlike Perrot’s, however,
Look Twice 19
my study presupposes neither a single twins myth open to reworking

nor a single chain of twin stories. It refuses the centrality and continu-
ity of Perrot’s model of the twins myth, and rejects the metaphor
of the chain in favour of finding multiple strands, discontinuities,
split ends and crossovers. Like Angela Carter’s mise en scène of twins in
Wise Children, with its false paternities and adoptions, it disrupts the
attempt at a genealogy of literary twins.
Looking forward
Far from having merely declined from a nineteenth-century Dostoevskian

apogee to become a facile narrative device in the twentieth century, as a
number of critics have contended, the figure of the double, frequently in
the form of the twins, has proliferated in popular and elevated forms. Less
unified than their Romantic antecedents, twins today come in more than
one gender and multiple narrative genres. But this disunity does not con-
stitute a dilution: there is concentration at a local level (the horror film,
the novel of soul-mates, the sociological research paper), where certain
tales demand constant retelling.
This insistence is not however the product of a particular anxiety
that carries across genres and eras: significance is situation specific.
The appearance of twins and doubles in narratives does not simply
signify the narcissistic defense of the ego, the projection of the un-
conscious, an attempt to cope with mental conflict. Nor does it nec-
essarily embody the quest for self-realisation, the refusal of the real,
or the incomplete self. Rather it acquires meaning in the context of
historically precise conjunctions of genre and gender.
The chapters that follow originated as reflections on distinct corpora
of twin tales: a set of novels here, a cluster of films there. Their lack of
relation intrigued me: Chatwin’s twins had so little in common with
Rodi’s, de Loo’s with Humbert’s, the filmic brothers of The Krays with
those of Double Impact. Yet within clusters certain tropes reappeared
insistently. Neither the divergences nor the convergences were ade-
quately explained by existing studies of twins and doubles, few of
which offered sustained attention to contemporary texts and several
of which dismissed popular representations altogether. I thus decided
to draw my analyses of twin tales together to argue for a broader
understanding of the ways in which twin narratives play out in con-
temporary culture. This book is the result. It invokes genre to account
for diversity and repetition among twin tales.8 And in its attention to
the possibilities and difficulties of shifting generic constraints, it offers
an understanding of what is at stake in twin tales that depart from

familiar patterns.
May the following analyses of the adventures of Benjamin and Lewis
Jones, of Rachel and her twin lovers, of Blake and Francis Falls, of
Mitchell and Kitten, of Anne and Nadège, of Charlie and Donald
Kaufman find an echo in the reader. And may the literary and screen
twins that succeed them continue both to divert us and to divert from
the narrative paths that have been laid.
2
Twins and the Couple: Surviving
Sameness in Novels of Twin Lives
The Bloomfield’s closed circle
They say truth is stranger than fiction. In any case, the same narrative
problems arise in the telling of it. Let me start with the tale of the
identical Bloomfield twins, William and John, who lived, worked and
died together. Born three minutes apart, they died only two minutes
apart, aged 61, of almost simultaneous heart-attacks. But how do you
tell a story of resemblance, a story where nothing manages to drive
the two apart or dialecticise the relation into an opposition between
contrasting twins?
The story as told in the Australian newspaper and in Brisbane’s
Courier Mail is one of the closed cell of perfect identity. ‘[T]he twins
lived in a world of their own, totally self-sufficient in each other’s
company,’ ‘oblivious’ and ‘impervious’ to others (Montgomery and
Walker, 1996). ‘[C]loser than a married couple could ever be,’ with ‘no
need for close friends,’ the ‘reclusive’ ‘soulmate[s]’ ‘learnt to ignore the
outside world’; ‘no one could penetrate their inner circle’ (Russell,
1996). The lack of any access to the closed world of the twins makes it
hard to tell a tale of their life together.
So what can be told? There is a tale available, that of their death, and
there are models for it. The story is thus told as a Romantic tale of
decadence and decay in the best tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe’s
‘The House of Usher,’ a genteel pair of pallid, strikingly similar twins,
Roderick and Madeline Usher, languish in their crumbling mansion as
their premature death approaches, a simultaneous demise that marks
the end of the dynastic line and precipitates the collapse of the house
that shrouds them. Like the Usher twins, the Bloomfields ‘came from
an aristocratic family’ (Russell, 1996). They ‘were their parents’ only
21
children and grew up in decaying splendour in one of Hobart’s stately

homes’ (Montgomery and Walker, 1996). There is a faintly fin de siècle
feel to the descriptions of their lifestyle (which – not incidentally – also
correspond to a gay stereotype): ‘cultured, elegant dandies who
enjoyed dressing up’ and ‘loved attending [art] exhibitions in expens-
ive, fashionable clothes,’ they wore fluffy tailor-made bow-ties, and
shared a passion for art and fine food, but were heard to mumble
morbidly about dying. In a conclusion worthy of Poe, there were prob-
lems telling the twins apart at their death. Since they carried their
papers in the same leather pouch, ‘the only clue as to who was who
came from the ‘W’ and ‘J’ monograms on their underwear’ (Russell,
1996).
But the problem that interests me is not that of telling twins apart
but of telling them together. The Bloomfields were in their 60s when
they died. Unlike the Usher twins, theirs is a somewhat early, but not a
particularly untimely death. And yet, closure, decay and the inevitable
course towards death seem to be the constants of the stories we tell
about sameness. I suspect, however, there is an alternative, potentially
more radical story about this couple that we do not know how to tell,
or for which we do not have readily available models. This chapter
is about the difficulty of telling such a story. And at stake is the ques-
tion of the viability of a certain understanding of coupledom: a couple
relation not defined by contrast and the synthesis of differences into
oneness.
The wages of twins
Stories about twins appear short on survivors. From Romulus and

Remus to popular film today, a high proportion of twin tales conclude
with the death of one or both twins. Certainly twins escape with their
lives in comedies of confusion (whether ancient, Shakespearian or con-
temporary), but in these genres they have no life together. Indeed, as
René Girard remarks, they are usually separated at birth and, in plays,
never appear on stage together until the very last scene (1981: 66–7).
Similarly, stories of the reunion of twins raised apart tend to end with
both twins alive (see Chapter 5). Twins who are not separated early, on
the other hand, twins whose lives are entwined are frequently doomed.
Why is it that narrative resolution so often spells untimely death
for these twins? Is it because twins threaten our notions of discrete
bodies and indivisible individuals? Or because they disturb the social
order by disturbing the opposition between same and different, between
Twins and the Couple 23
self and other? Is it because they challenge the canonical couple, the
marriage of complementary others that they are sacrificed in stories? No
doubt it is for all of these reasons … but not all at the same time. The
deaths are different – as are the forces leading to them – in different eras,
in different genres. This chapter surveys the major threats to the nar-
rative survival of twins in ancient, Romantic and contemporary tales and
discusses the significance of the deaths they represent, before examining
some attempts to rewrite the fate of the twin couple in the latter half of
the twentieth century.
Legend abounds with stories of fratricidal rivalry, which threatens
the life of several of the mythic twin founders of cities and nations:
Remus dies at the hands of Romulus over the site of Rome; Proëtus and
Acrisius of Argos quarrel in the womb and continue to war against one
another. Where it does not lead to death, such rivalry may force twins
apart – to the point where Esau and Jacob found separate nations – as a
means of survival.
As Zazzo points out (1984: 154–5), these stories relate attempts to
re-establish a social order that is threatened by the conflicting claims
to power represented by twin leaders. Death thus serves to restore equi-
librium. Girard goes further in associating twins and death in his
analysis of the theme of enemy brothers. He claims that twins threaten
the social order through their very existence, for their shared position
within the family (and indeed their family resemblance) blurs the dis-
tinctions on which peace and order depend. This erasure of difference
inevitably gives rise to sacrificial violence (1977: 49–67).
Among ancient legends, a more optimistic view of fraternity is
offered by the story of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. Of the ‘heav-
enly twins,’ only one – Pollux – was born immortal. The mortal Castor
is killed, not at the hands of his twin, but in battle against another set
of twins. Such is the love between the brothers that Pollux pleads with
his father Zeus to be allowed to share his own immortality with his
twin. The request is granted and the twins thereafter take it in turns
to die, such that there is always one in the underworld, and one in
the living world.1 While marked by the death of a twin, this most
widespread of twin legends2 is a tale of the partial survival of a twin
couple.
Fast-forwarding past the Renaissance comedies of confusion to the
concentration of twin tales in nineteenth-century fiction, we find
that here too a form of fratricidal rivalry leads to the demise of twins,
but that its sense is somewhat different. Unlike the fraternal twins of
legend, usually divided by appearance as well as by tastes, Romantic
twins and doubles are often outwardly identical, but diametrically –

even diabolically – opposed in character. The divide is primarily a
moral one. A persecuting double in the form of an evil twin (Tupper’s
The Twins: A Tale of Concealment, 1849), doppelgänger (Dostoevsky’s
‘The Double’, Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner) or spirit (Maupassant’s ‘Le Horla’) struggles to usurp the life of
the protagonist, a struggle often culminating in a murderous suicide
whereby one twin, in trying to kill the other, ends up killing himself
(cf. Rank, 1971: 33). Poe furnishes the classic example of the simul-
taneous death of identical rivals in the tale of ‘William Wilson’:
William’s life of vice, debauchery and intoxication is hindered by
his namesake and likeness, born on the same day, who is endowed
with a highly developed sense of morality. This double dogs William
and intercepts his plans, admonishing him in a whisper, until the
day William stabs him repeatedly with a rapier. His dying words,
which somehow speak through William’s own voice, reveal the inter-
twined fate of the two: ‘in my death, see by this image, which
is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself’ (Poe, 1965:
325). Persecuting doubles and deadly twins harking back to the
Romantic tradition continue to populate contemporary popular
genres, especially thrillers.3
Unlike the foundation myths, these tales are linked to questions of
personal rather than social identity, and the threat portrayed by the
double is above all a threat to selfhood (as Rank, Tymms, Rogers and
Keppler emphasise). The issue of twins as a couple, the possibility of
any relationship beyond the desire for mutual extermination, rarely
arises as the struggle between moral forces is played out. Indeed in
many cases it is unclear whether there are indeed two characters, or
whether the ‘twin’ is a projection of the repressed other half of the
protagonist’s own self.
There is, however, another twin topos dating from the nineteenth
century that spotlights the twins as couple, and it too remains insistent
throughout the twentieth century. Once again, Poe provides a tem-
plate: ‘The House of Usher,’ echoed in the Bloomfield story, tells of a
twin death very different from that of William Wilson: soulmate twins,
turned toward each other rather than the outside world, sink into stag-
nation and perish there. Their house collapses into the still mirror-like
lake that surrounds it. Perrot argues that the Usher twins die from
being ‘enclosed in that dead-end situation that is the twin condition’
(1976: 162). Whereas the otherness of the other twin is magnified in
the stories of rivalry, here it is suppressed to maintain resemblance.
This is not death by opposition but death by a suffocating sameness,

an implosion rather than an explosion of the couple.
We recognise this scenario as one of narcissism. Poe’s tale predates
the psychoanalytical use of the term but anticipates fully its connota-
tions of decay, sterility, insularity, and nostalgia for the lost Eden of
the womb. It was towards the middle of the nineteenth century that
the Narcissus myth came to be associated with sexual psychology and
pathologised.4 Following Freud’s 1914 study, narcissism was used to
denote not only auto-eroticism, but an early stage of psychical devel-
opment, and the choice of a love object who resembles oneself – past,
present or future – in some way (Freud, 1953–74, Vol. 14: 73–102).
Freud explicitly linked forms of narcissism with homosexuality,
hypochondria and melancholia, whereby a libidinal investment turned
inward rather than outward accounted for a morbid withdrawal from
the outside world. These elements reappear insistently in tales of twin
couples spiralling inwards to self-destruction.
Not twins, but twin-like, are the pale, quasi-identical sister and sickly
brother in Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles (novel 1925, film 1949), whose
intense, tortured relationship is played out in the cluttered single room
they shared in childhood, which they recreate in the grand gallery of
an eighteen-room mansion. Here Elisabeth’s jealous attempts to keep
Paul to herself result in their double suicide. The implication of incest
is less covert in S. Corinna Bille’s short story ‘Le noeud’ (1974): equally
pallid and totally absorbed in one another, the young brother-sister
twins drown intertwined in the still waters of the lake. Elliot and
Beverly Mantle, the twin brothers of David Cronenberg’s film Dead
Ringers (1988), illustrate perfectly the dangers of the suppression of
difference with their regression to infantility and early demise in a
claustrophobic, intra-uterine world.5 And Oswald and Oliver Deuce,
the increasingly resemblant twin zoologists in Peter Greenaway’s ter-
minally titled film A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), become so obsessed
with rotting flesh that they set cameras to photograph their own
suicide and decomposition. In Marie Redonnet’s play Tir & Lir (1988),
the indistinguishable Mab and Mub, increasingly bedridden, rot in the
squalor of their small room, mirroring the death of their twins Tir
(after the amputation of his gangrenous legs) and Lir (confined to bed
with venereal disease).6 Marjorie Wallace’s biography The Silent Twins
resonates with its fictional counterparts: June and Jennifer Gibbons are
seen to slide from elective mutism and self-imposed physical confine-
ment at home (where they ‘rot in their stinking little room with its
piles of crumpled paper and bits of half-eaten food,’ Wallace, 1986: 77)
to indefinite confinement in Broadmoor prison hospital.7 A 1994 post-

script recounts Jennifer’s self-predicted death from heart failure at the
age of thirty on the day of their release (Farmer, 1996: 275–8; cf. the
documentary films of The Silent Twins, 1985, 1994).
Over the course of the twentieth century, the twin protagonists of
these stories become increasingly indistinguishable: the brother/
sister pairs (necessarily fraternal, although portrayed as alike) giving
way to identical (and therefore same-sex) twins in the more recent
examples. The spectre of incest is raised more insistently with regard
to the mixed sex pairs. The story, however, is strikingly similar in
both cases: immobility and isolation leading to death and decay
as life and blood sap away. This has become the most readily avail-
able topos for representing the fate of twins who form a couple.
Death here is the ‘solution’ to a relationship question, not an
identity question, and decrees that same and same cannot live and
love together. As Jean Perrot suggests, ‘the identical, trapped in a
reflective relationship, has no future other than that of irremediable
destruction (self-devouring)’ (1976: 55).
It is perhaps because the topos resonates with pervasive psychoana-
lytical discourses of narcissism that it can found in virtually all non-
comic narrative genres (short stories, plays, films, novels, biographies,
documentaries and newspaper articles are cited above) and crosses
through Western cultures (French, Swiss, Canadian, British, Anglo-
Dutch and Australian writers are represented in this chapter). Clearly
this influential topos reinforces traditional taboos in meting out nar-
rative punishment for incest. However the insistence with which it is
used – particularly with same-sex twins – in the last quarter of the
twentieth century suggests that something more is at stake in portray-
ing the failure of like and like to survive together. This period saw a
rethinking of the nature of the couple through, for example, the ques-
tioning of traditional (polarised) gender roles and the rise of gay pride.
In more abstract discourses, it saw feminist psychoanalysts and
philosophers (Irigaray, Cixous) questioning whether the passage from
primary narcissism to the symbolic order should be celebrated, and
poststructuralist theorists (Derrida, Deleuze) embracing doubleness as
the norm and condition of existence rather than as an aberration or
threat. The time was ripe to revisit the topos of the twin couple and
re-explore models of coupledom. In many cases, and notably those
cited above, this exploration ultimately reaffirms the ingrained idea
that sameness spells death: differentiate or die! We are led to under-
stand that partners in life must complement not mirror each other.
There are, however, a small number of twin tales that attempt to tell
such a story differently, that challenge the scenario to varying degrees.
It is to this possibility that I now turn.
I propose to trace the problematic in three novels, and the choice of
genre is pertinent. Although, as we have seen, twins are doomed in a
range of narrative genres, the particular problem of telling a story of
sameness is exacerbated in the novel, for narrative time introduces
change and difference. Put simply, things happen – and happen to
disturb resemblance. The length of the novel – as opposed to the
newspaper column, the short story, or even the feature film – thus
increases the difficulty of sustaining a story of a twin couple, making
the problem a narrative one as much as a psychological one.
It is significant that arguably the three most renowned twin novels
of the later twentieth century, all by major literary figures, explore the
relationship between male twins who form a couple. The novels
in question are Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala (1966), Michel Tour-
nier’s Les Météores (1975, translated as Gemini, 1981), and Bruce
Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (1982), and each traces the lives (or life) of
twin brothers. With the exception of Mark Twain’s Those Extraordinary
Twins (conjoined but not a couple), The Solid Mandala appears to be
the first novel of same-sex twins who live out their lives together.
Indeed its closest – perhaps the only – antecedent seems to be the
Dioscuri legend. And yet, within sixteen years, two more such novels
are published by feted authors – Tournier and Chatwin – before the
topos is taken up in the auteur cinema examples of Dead Ringers and
A Zed and Two Noughts. Clearly, something about the union of twin
brothers has caught the imagination of the times.8
The three novels come from different countries (Australia, France,
Britain), but I submit that history (their different decades) separates
them more than geography. White, Tournier and Chatwin (all three
widely travelled) draw on a common pool of cultural material: each of
the three explicitly positions his text as a reworking of the Dioscuri
myth; White refers extensively to Greek legend and Dostoevsky; and
Tournier’s novel adapts a multitude of twin legends from the history of
Western civilisation.9 All three thus situate their writing within and
against a broader Western literary tradition.10 And if White’s twins are
anchored to an outer suburb of Sydney and Chatwin’s to an isolated
farm in the Welsh hills, while Tournier’s chase each other around the
globe, all three novels develop parallel thematics of space (confined/
outward-looking). The vastly different geographical settings are used to
similar purposes.
Although from different national cultures, White, Tournier and

Chatwin share a somewhat loose subcultural affinity. It is hardly
coincidental that all three novels are written by gay or bisexual men,
and that the twins in each case form a same-sex couple. The sexual
dimension of the relation between the brothers is explicit in Tournier’s
novel and alluded to in White’s. Chatwin’s is coyly non-committal on
this point, although the twins share a bed until their death. A version
of the story relayed orally was apparently considerably gayer (Clapp,
1997: 198–9), and indeed Chatwin is said to have toyed with ‘Mr and
Mr Jones’ as a possible title, gesturing to a form of same-sex marriage
(197).
Although White’s autobiography explains that Waldo and Arthur,
the twins of The Solid Mandala, represent the two halves of himself
(1982: 146), issues of identity are overshadowed by the relationship
between the brothers, who form one of the ‘monumental couples’
(Indyk, 2003) that dominate White’s novels. Moreover, White
identified most clearly with Waldo (‘Waldo is myself at my coldest
and worst,’ White, 1982: 146–7), and at times referred to Manoly
Lascaris, his partner for almost fifty years, as a solid mandala, thus
associating him with Waldo’s twin Arthur. 11 Parallels can thus be
drawn between the twinship and the life-long couple formed by
White and Lascaris.
Tournier is the most explicit in drawing an analogy between homo-
sexuality and twinship. In Le Vent Paraclet, he claims provocatively
that homosexuality as practised by singletons can only ever be an im-
itation of the relation between twins (Tournier, 1977: 254–5), echoing
Paul in Gemini (1981: 278).12 Paul’s flamboyantly gay uncle Alexandre
embodies this view with his fascination with copies and his efforts to
dress his lover to resemble himself (1981: 177–9, 239, 298). This view
of homosexuality, which collapses same-sex relations into sameness, is
vigorously rejected by many working in queer theory, who emphasise
diversity both within and between sexual relations of all colours.
However the status of sameness in same-sex relations remains an issue.
Joseph Bristow, for example, in his introduction to Sexual Sameness,
stresses the tension between sameness and difference that characterises
the politics of gay and lesbian criticism (1992: 1–8). And Leo Bersani,
who similarly introduces sameness into the title of his book Homos,
argues that ‘[h]omosexual desire is desire for the same from the per-
spective of a self already identified as different from itself,’ suggesting
that it ‘presupposes a desiring subject for whom the antagonism
between the different and the same no longer exists’ (1995: 59–60).
The question of negotiating resemblance within a couple (or a

coupling – Bersani in particular is no advocate of the couple) thus has
particular resonance in gay studies and queer theory, where the ques-
tion of sameness arises in a troubled and complex way. Gay studies,
however, is a relatively recent field of enquiry, and queer theory even
more so. This brings us back to the historical developments (in the
form of discursive shifts) that I suggest are more significant than
cultural origins in separating the texts.
The possibility of a convergence in the representation of twins and
gay couples is historically specific. It relies on an understanding of
sameness and difference as mutually entailing rather than opposed,
of sameness as a form of difference. This understanding, illustrated
by Bersani above, is a far cry from conceptions of homosexuality of
eighty years earlier, whereby sexual ‘inversion’ (a woman’s soul in a
man’s body or vice-versa, cf. Ellis, 1915) produced pseudo-heterosexual
same-sex couples in a dialectical synthesis of opposites.13 Vincent
Descombes, in Le Même et l’autre, argues that the problematisation of
the opposition between sameness and otherness is a defining character-
istic of modern French philosophy, and illustrates it with a duplicate
title page, showing that in order for two entities to be alike – even
exactly alike – they must be other than each other (1979: 7).14 The
influence of poststructuralism in the academy has increased the cur-
rency of these ideas: since the 1970s, we have learnt to talk glibly
about the split subject for whom the self is partly other; to denounce
the nostalgic search for the unified subject in favour of the différance
between instances of the ‘same’ self; and to deconstruct oppositions
by demonstrating the underlying sameness of contradictory terms.
And the rethinking of the relation between sameness and difference
has been embraced by postmodern popular culture: the poster for
Reitman’s film Twins (1988) features Danny de Vito and Arnold
Schwarzenegger, identically dressed, with the tag-line ‘not even their
mother can tell them apart.’15 Thus new discourses have come to rival
the dialectical world-view of the advancement of (hi)stories through
the resolution of oppositions.
Patrick White’s 1966 novel pre-dates poststructuralist and postmod-
ern discourses. Tournier’s and Chatwin’s novels, on the other hand, are
contemporaneous with their development and, I suggest, reflect them
to some extent. White, Tournier and Chatwin were working with
similar narrative materials and referred to a shared tradition of twin
tales. However, new ways of conceiving of the couple (and therefore of
twinship) became possible – ‘thinkable’ – in the years separating the
novels. For this reason, I shall deal rather briefly and selectively with
The Solid Mandala, highlighting aspects that relate to the other novels,
and reading it as an indication of the narrative solutions to the
impasse of narcissism that were possible in 1966. I shall then pick up
these threads and trace their development in Tournier’s Gemini, before
concentrating at some length on Chatwin’s novel and on its reworking
of the material, for On the Black Hill, although it reads as the least fan-
ciful of the three, constitutes the most radical rewriting of the narrative
fate of twins.
Patrick White: Arthur, Waldo and the marbles
In The Solid Mandala, Arthur and Waldo Brown live together, breathe as
one (White, 1966: 30, 33, 76), and share a bed until they are in their sev-
enties. Like Castor and Pollux, they are not identical twins, and like
Madeline and Roderick Usher, their world eventually implodes. On the
one hand, the very fact that they reach old age together already consti-
tutes a considerable challenge to the traditional twin topoï I have des-
cribed. On the other hand, like the Bloomfields, they hardly epitomise
the viable couple. Somehow they have survived, but without ever having
had a future. Together with a couple of mangy old dogs, they live their
entire lives in Terminus Road in a house that disintegrates around them.
And like their street, their life goes nowhere: hand in hand they walk
down the road and back again.
But stagnation is not the only threat to their existence. Waldo sees
himself as the intelligent, literary one and insists on his difference
from his twin, but in fact Arthur mirrors him and shadows him in his
pursuits. Waldo feels persecuted by this ‘double,’ dreams of shaking off
his brother, and when he realises that he cannot escape from Arthur,
dreams of killing him. He dies while mentally trying to destroy his
twin, and his death is a sort of suicidal murder – a hatred that chokes
him to death. Even in death, Waldo is ‘still attached to Arthur at
the wrist’ with fingers like ‘steel circlets’ grasping his brother (295).
Distressed that he was unable to prevent Waldo’s death by hatred,
Arthur flees and Waldo’s body rots in the rotting house and is partly
eaten by the dogs. He thus succumbs to both of the classic threats to
twins: murderous rivalry that turns back upon himself, and decay.
Arthur, on the other hand, transcends these dangers. Arthur is the
idiot savant whose simple-mindedness betrays a naïve wisdom. Soft and
round and loving, he is concerned to maintain twinship, but not as an
exclusive or closed relation. He seeks wholeness and oneness with his
brother, but a oneness that is much more inclusive than narcissistic

unity, a oneness that embraces others, for all his relationships are
open, shared. He finds symbols of what he seeks in marbles, which are
like solid mandalas, protective circles of fullness and totality (238),
microcosms of the world, mystic images of harmony. Arthur has
several precious marbles, including one for Waldo and one for himself.
The centre of his own is a double spiral that ‘knit[s] and unknit[s] so
reasonably’ (281), like his relation with his brother. Waldo’s marble is
quite different, with ‘a knot at the centre, which made [Arthur] con-
sider palming it off, until, on looking long and close, he discovered the
knot was the whole point’ (228). In fact, the marble is in the image
both of Waldo, ‘born with his innards twisted’ (32), and of Waldo’s
relation with Arthur: Waldo, who cannot knit and unknit twinship,
who cannot disentangle himself other than destructively.
Arthur wants to share wholeness and fulfilment, even cosmic under-
standing, with his brother and with others. He sees ‘that the knot
at the heart of the mandala, at most times so tortuously inwoven,
would dissolve, if only temporarily, in light’ (273) and finds himself
‘[o]ffering the knotted mandala. While half sensing that Waldo would
never untie the knot’ (273).16 But Waldo refuses Arthur’s gift of a
marble, and it is as if he rejects the offer to share in his brother’s
immortality. For we gradually realise that Arthur (who secretly pores
over Dostoevsky) figures the divine idiot. Arthur remains after Waldo’s
death, knowing that he was not intended to die. In a final apotheosis
as he is taken to the asylum, he rises God-like, Christ-like, like the red
disc of the sun. But unlike Pollux, he is unable to share his divinity
with his brother. Despite their longevity, the Brown Brothers are failed
Dioscuri.
This is a very partial retelling of The Solid Mandala.17 What I wish
to draw from it is a reading of the image that features in the title and
its use to suggest a possible way out of the stultifying closure of the
twin relation. The Solid Mandala is less obviously about sameness than
Tournier’s and Chatwin’s twin novels. Waldo and Arthur are not iden-
tical – indeed they are opposites in many ways – and yet they are
doubles, like the two halves of the self that White claims they rep-
resent. Their relation is dialectical – Arthur strains to achieve the
wholeness of synthesis from opposition – and yet their mirroring of
one another produces the suffocating narcissistic environment that
kills Waldo. The book is not a rethinking of the canonical couple –
the union of complementary others – and yet Arthur’s gift of the
mandala and all it represents will find echoes in the solutions proposed
by Tournier and Chatwin to the problem of surviving sameness within

a couple. The offer of the marble with its ephemeral knot can be seen
as a (thwarted) attempt to maintain the wholeness and unity of twin-
ship (its closure) while at the same time opening it (embracing others,
integrating the outside world into its microcosm). This is Arthur’s
visionary solution to the narcissistic insularity of the twin relation: to
make a mandala of it. It fails to save them, however, for it is a solution
of cosmic proportions, and Waldo is only too human.
Michel Tournier: Jean-Paul and the elastic bubble
Michel Tournier’s Gemini reads as a massive thematisation of twin-

ship, quoting and recycling the history of the Western imagination
of twins. 18 Its protagonists, Jean and Paul, are so alike that they are
collectively called Jean-Paul and the name is conjugated with a sin-
gular verb, as if they are indivisible.19 The ‘geminate cell’ (Tournier,
1981: 196) of their existence is a biological cell that Jean comes
to see as a prison cell. It protects the perfection of their resemblance
from differentiation and safeguards their relationship, ‘which unites
like with like’ (198), from otherness. Its closed circle is also rep-
resented as a sealed glass bulb (200, 330) and as an egg. Self-
sufficient, inflexible and fragile, it isolates them from the rest of the
world. Full and heavy like the silence of their perfect communion
(‘dialogue of silences, not of words’ 133), it admits of no story unless
it is disturbed.
For within the hermetic cell of this twinship, there is no need for
mediation of any kind. There is thus no noise. Following Michel Serres
(1982), Ross Chambers describes ‘noise’ as the ‘interference’ in the
system that prevents perfect and direct communication (1991: 30–1).
Noise interferes with the immediate transmission of thought and ideas
such that they require interpretation. Noise thus provides a place for
the reader, and for storytelling. And as Chambers points out, the noise
of communication, its interpretability creates ‘room for manoeuvre.’
Room for manoeuvre is precisely what is lacking in Jean-Paul’s twin
cell.
By protecting the twins from differentiation and noise, the cell
resists the passage of time. In a full writing out of the narrative prob-
lems posed by twinship, we read: ‘The geminate cell is the opposite of
being, it is the negation of time, of history, of stories’ (Tournier, 1981:
196, translation modified, cf. 1975: 274).20 In its timelessness, it resists
not only stories, but life itself: ‘There is marble and eternity in ovoid
loving, something monotone and unmoving which is like death’

(1981: 199).
Clearly, if the embryonic story of this twinship is not to be stifled or
étouffée dans l’oeuf, then the cell must be prised open. It is shattered by
Jean, who becomes engaged and then flees his brother when Paul
breaks up the engagement. Jean travels endlessly and without destina-
tion, seeking rupture, solitude and otherness, seeking lightness and
emptiness after the density and inertia of life with Paul. Each new
experience is an attempt to maximise difference from his twin. Paul,
however, self-appointed keeper of the cell and indeed his brother’s
keeper, dreams nostalgically of repairing the cell. To maintain their
perfect identity, the sedentary Paul is obliged to pursue. In order to
restore resemblance, he tries to experience whatever Jean experiences,
but Jean puts a world of difference between them.
The pursuit of one twin by the other resembles to some extent a
Derridean décalage, a discrepancy, a deferral, a gap of différance between
two instances of the same (Derrida, 1982: 1–27; cf. Rosello, 1990: 160),
and here we see a vivid reflection of the poststructuralist discourses
contemporary with the novel. Paul’s journey is prompted by dissym-
metry: he falls forward into movement when he tries to lean on his
absent brother, and the ensuing chase continues to be characterised by
this lopsided gait.21 In fact the brothers were always différant in this
sense – Jean’s clock always chiming just before Paul’s (Tournier, 1981:
127), Jean ‘irreducibly ahead’ of Paul (328) – but the separation in time
and space as they race around the world makes it impossible to ignore
(cf. Maclean, 2003: 67–8, 85–6). This representation is not, however,
ultimately sustained. The conclusion to the novel recuperates différance
into a synthesis of opposites: the similarity of the twins turns to con-
trast in order for Paul, still nostalgic for the twin cell, finally to achieve
a permanent oneness with his brother.
As Jean travels, he loses weight – even corporeality – to the point
where Paul hardly recognises a portrait of him. The twins become
increasingly antithetical. Paul finally understands that his dream of
repairing the heavy, brittle cell that once enclosed them is imposs-
ible, and that the cell must be transformed into something lighter,
more elastic, and able to encompass distance. This transformation,
however, requires suffering, just as glass becomes pliable only when
heated to an unbearable temperature (Tournier, 1981: 309). Such
torture occurs when Paul loses an arm and a leg tunnelling under the
newly erected Berlin wall. But this mutilation is in fact merely a
physical realisation of Paul’s existing condition, for Jean’s absence
was already a metaphoric amputation. Jean meanwhile has com-

pletely disappeared and Paul accepts that his brother no longer exists
as flesh and bones. Paul’s absent limbs, on the other hand, tingle as
though they are there, and he realises that this phantom part of his
body is in fact Jean, now physically incorporated into him: ‘I know
it, this left side of mine which moves, wriggles and pushes out prodi-
gious extensions into my room, into the garden and soon perhaps
into the sky and sea. It is Jean, now become a part of his identical
brother’ (447). (Jean-)Paul’s limbs are extensible: they stretch out
infinitely into the room, the garden, the cosmos. His body starts to
resemble an elastic bubble: ‘I am in a bubble – which expands and
contracts. I am that bubble. Sometimes its outer membrane collapses
flaccidly and clings to my body, fitting my own skin, at others
it swells out, enveloping the bed and invading the room’ (439). Like
the mandala in White’s novel, the bubble becomes a microcosm
of the universe: ‘My injuries are the narrow scene within whose
confines I must rebuild the universe’ (440). At the conclusion of the
novel, Paul is no longer suppressing difference and otherness in order
to maintain resemblance. Indeed the twins can scarcely be said
to resemble each other at all at this stage. Rather Paul embraces a
world of difference as his phantom limbs project outwards ever
farther, embodying his lost twin and the distance between them.
Paradoxically, however, he maintains the nostalgic ideal of whole-
ness and oneness in the image of the bubble that envelops this
projection and thus contains the twinship.22
Paul has accomplished what Arthur Brown could not: otherness is
absorbed into the twin relation to preserve it and the twins are
definitively united. Resemblance has been sacrificed in order to achieve
it, but the dialectical synthesis of the two brothers is presented as a
triumph. Their unity, however, is no longer of this world. As in the
Dioscuri myth, the absent Jean shares his immortality with his earthly
brother23 … or with what is left of him, for the apotheosis takes a ter-
rible toll. The twins are aged only thirty at the conclusion of the novel,
and one is missing, presumed dead, while the other is a double
amputee. Only half a body remains from the original two, and while
his spirit spreads into the universe, Paul is largely unable to commun-
icate with those who nurse him: ‘for a long time now my words and
my screams have ceased to reach those around me’ (439). Like the orig-
inal Gemini, Jean-Paul has become a celestial body: the fused couple
has no mortal viability. The perils of narcissism may have been
side-stepped, but this is no model for flesh and blood survival.
Bruce Chatwin: Lewis, Benjamin and the eggs
It is difficult to appreciate just how unusual Bruce Chatwin’s On the

Black Hill is, for it reads so plausibly. Lewis and Benjamin Jones live
together on their Welsh farm, form a couple, and share what had been
their parents’ bed for forty-two years, until one dies at the age of
eighty. The twin relation not only survives, but the twins look to the
future. And they live, not in Terminus Road, but at a farm known as
‘The Vision.’ This story of longevity and of looking forward is not,
however, made from radically new materials, but recycles elements
with which we are already familiar.
As children, Lewis and Benjamin Jones are identical to the point of
being indistinguishable. They share and swap everything, including
their names on occasion. They share a secret language and have
trouble learning the difference between ‘yours’ and ‘mine.’ But living
as they do in the world, the twins, like Tournier’s Jean-Paul, cannot
avoid the slight differences brought about by the passage of time and
(hi)story. Benjamin’s childhood illness makes him more homey: he
bakes cakes, dresses up in his mother’s clothes, and becomes his
mother’s favourite. And being conscripted and tortured as a conscien-
tious objector during the First World War does nothing to make him
more outgoing. Lewis, on the other hand, takes an interest in aviation,
especially air disasters, and dreams of travel. Like Jean in Gemini, he
seems to be more oriented towards the outside world than his brother.
He has the urge to wander and in particular to wander towards women.
And like Paul, Benjamin, the stay-at-home, is devoted to keeping the
twins together. Even as children, when Lewis speaks of marrying,
Benjamin bursts into tears. As he grows up, Benjamin still wishes to
live permanently with his twin.24
In adulthood, twinship is threatened in the time-honoured ways.
There is the stagnation and sterility entailed in the refusal of otherness:
already at the age of twenty-two, Lewis and Benjamin ‘behav[e] like
crabby old bachelors’ (Chatwin, 1982: 131) who have passed directly
from childhood to old age. They travel no further than the chapel, and
even the local village represents enemy soil: ‘Since the day of the peace
celebrations, the twins’ world had contracted to a few square miles’
(131). Although they receive bicycles from their mother for their
thirty-first birthday and gradually ‘extend[ ] their range’ (161),
Benjamin in particular mistrusts ‘anyone “from off”’ (176–7). Rather
than venturing into society, they gradually increase the size of the
farm: Benjamin and his mother buy land ‘as if with each new acre they
could push back the frontier of the hostile world’ (173). Just as they
reject the outside world, they refuse the passage of time: ‘Deliberately,
as if reaching back to the innocence of early childhood, they turned
away from the modern age; and though the neighbours invested in
new farm machinery, they persuaded their father not to waste his
money’ (131). They resist all forms of change: ‘time had stood still,
here, on the Radnor Hills’ (157).
The closure of their relation does not however spare them the
anguish of a fratricidal antagonism that turns back upon itself. This
antagonism is born of jealousy, but the jealousy is one of possessive-
ness, rather than of rivalry. When Lewis has to work on another farm,
Benjamin pines: ‘He hated Lewis for leaving and suspected him of
stealing his soul’ (99). But the hatred recoils on Benjamin and, in what
appears to be an attempt at suicide, he almost dies, which brings Lewis
home. Similarly, every time Lewis follows a girl, the possessive
Benjamin does his best to disrupt the affair. When Lewis finally loses
his virginity, it causes the most severe rupture between the twins.
There is a fist fight, and Lewis has to leave, for ‘Benjamin’s love for
Lewis was murderous’ (181). Punishing himself, Lewis tries to slash his
wrists. In both instances, murderous intent and suicidal attempt are
intertwined.
In recycling elements that are common to so many twin stories, it is
as if Chatwin is working through a tradition and writing out the prob-
lems of the move he is making. It is as if he is telling the story of the
difficulty of telling this story. For somehow, the twins manage to deal
with these threats and not only survive but ultimately thrive together.
At a thanksgiving service at the end of the novel, the chapel is filled
with the results of the harvest. We see the culmination of a life that is
clearly considered to have been fruitful and profitable. This result has
not been easy to come by, but the twins’ struggles are obviously
all worth it in the end. A future is explicitly attributed to them: at the
end of their life, ‘they knew that their lives had not been wasted and
that time, in its healing circle, had wiped away the pain and the anger,
the shame and the sterility, and had broken into the future with the
promise of new things’ (14). This sentence, which anticipates the story
about to be told, makes reference to the dangers to twinship of both
anger and sterility. In a sense, the story will be about overcoming these
impediments. And if, as we have seen, narrative time threatens the
twin relation by introducing change and difference, we are given to
understand that it can also resolve these problems. But how? The
search for an answer will take us along a circuitous route.
Single egg twins

Chatwin’s twins live in a very circumscribed area from which they
are loathe to stray, and so it is not surprising to find a recurring
image of wholeness, unity and closure to match the Bloomfields’
circle, Arthur Brown’s marble-mandala and Jean-Paul’s cell-bubble.
At the beginning of the courtship of the twins’ parents, Mary looks
up to where Amos points: ‘She heard a soft crack and saw a yellow
smear on the toe of her boot. “Oh no!” she cried. “Now look what
I’ve done!” Her foot had crushed the nestful of eggs’ (Chatwin, 1982:
24). It seems you cannot make a relationship, any more than an
omelette, without breaking eggs. Mary breaks out of her solitude,
and leaves the isolation of her previous nest. Along with the eggs,
she breaks class barriers, prompting the clergyman, when she
informs him of her engagement, to spill his breakfast egg down his
cassock. Eggs are closed to safeguard their contents, but must not
remain so indefinitely or preservation gives way to putrefaction. And
eggs are fragile – they are hardly an appropriate image for long-term
survival. On the Black Hill is full of broken eggs.
A feud develops between ‘The Vision’ and ‘The Rock,’ a neighbour-
ing farm. Mary tries to patch up the quarrel when she sees her neigh-
bour, Aggie Watkins, selling eggs in town, but Aggie, full of venom,
spits at her. Half crazed, Aggie continues her cry ‘Fresh eggs! Fresh
eggs!’ (75), but when someone stops to buy, she protects her eggs even
from this incursion. The eggs remain whole, unsold. The divide
between the families continues. Years later, Mary again sees Aggie and
her eggs in the street, but this time Aggie is sobbing. Illiterate, she
believes the card she has received is news that her son has died in
battle. But Mary explains that it’s a Standard Field Service Postcard, and
that her son Jim is fine. Aggie
dropped her basket, and the two women flung their arms round
each other’s necks, and kissed.
‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Mary said, pointing to the egg-yolks
smeared over the shiny wet cobbles.
‘Eggs!’ said Mrs Watkins, disdainfully. (96)
The isolation of whole eggs is scorned, for friendship depends on

breaking the shell.
Things are not quite so simple for the twins, however, for whom a
relationship with an outsider is not simply a case of coming out of
one’s own shell, but of breaking the shell that protects the twin rela-
tionship from difference:
The twins’ first memory […] was of the day they were stung by the
wasp.
They were perched on high-chairs at the tea-table. […] Mary was
spooning egg-yolk into Lewis’s mouth and Benjamin, in a fit of jeal-
ousy, was waving his hands to attract attention when his left hand
hit the wasp, and was stung. […] from then on, they associated eggs
with wasps and mistrusted anything yellow. (42)
Whereas their mother enters the egg-and-spoon race at the local fair
and keeps bees, the twins mistrust opened eggs and are frightened of
being stung. They shy away from relationships and infiltration from
outside. When a bossy woman at the fair scrutinises them and finds a
tiny mole behind Benjamin’s right ear, a mark of difference, the twins
bolt in terror.
We could call this time the whole-egg phase of their twinship. It lasts
throughout their childhood. They seek to maintain an unmediated,
noiseless relation and, in a refusal of otherness, eliminate any third
party. As small children, they sacrifice their toy: ‘they decided that he,
too, had come between them. So the moment Mary’s back was turned,
they sat him on the bridge, and tipped him in the brook’ (44). But this
was not just any toy. It was a Humpty Dumpty: in trying to preserve
their oneness, they give an image of own inevitable fate – the egg that
couldn’t be put together again. Then a baby sister arrives, and the
twins do not want her either:
They had pestered their mother to give them a baby sister; and
when, at last, she arrived, they climbed up to the bedroom, each
carrying a coppery chrysanthemum in an egg-cup full of water.
They saw an angry pink creature biting Mary’s breast. They dropped
their offerings on the floor, and dashed downstairs.
‘Send her away,’ they sobbed. (Chatwin, 1982: 45)
Certainly the twins are jealous: their mother is the only third person
with a place in their life, for she initially provides a protective nest for
their twinship. Their rejection of Rebecca goes further than this,
however. For like the egg-cups that they finally balk at offering her, a
relation with their sibling would not simply hold their twinship in place,
but would allow its fragile wholeness to be opened up and consumed.
Nonetheless, the twins do not live in a world where eggs can remain
whole and timeless, sealed off from the outside. As mortals, their world is
one where eggs are and must be broken, a menacing prospect while the
twins are caught in the nostalgia for impossible unity, but a fact that they
ultimately learn to accept and even turn to their advantage. Before they
can achieve this, however, they must pass through a painful and destruct-
ive, egg-breaking phase of twoness, in which third parties are no longer
excluded by the twins but come between them. For Lewis, a third person
is a means of distinguishing himself from his brother, of maximising
difference in a way that sets up an antagonistic relation.
The sting and penetration of the wasp are echoed during early adult-
hood in the hurt Benjamin suffers through Lewis’s sexual encounters
with outsiders. It is no coincidence that when Lewis flirts, ‘the girls
egg[ ] him on’ (88). At the market one day, Lewis finds himself next
to a long-legged woman. ‘On her arm was a large wicker basket.
A younger man was with her and, when he let fall a couple of eggs,
she pushed the sunglasses up on to her forehead and drawled in a grav-
elly voice, “Darling, don’t be so hopeless…”’ (173). Joy and Nigel are
very much outsiders to the community, bohemian artists who come to
rent a farm in the area. Joy is far from worried by the prospect of a few
eggs broken, of a new conquest, and indeed takes it upon herself to
seduce Lewis. Lewis ignores the yellow warning sign – or is perhaps
attracted to it – and loses his virginity. This occasions the previously
mentioned rupture between the twins. Mary explains to Lewis: ‘“You
can’t come home yet. It’s terrible to see your brother in such a state.”
Benjamin’s love for Lewis was murderous. Spring came. […] It still
seemed that Benjamin’s anger would never die down’ (181).
The twins are only finally brought back together by the death of their
mother. This is fitting, for in fact Mary has played a crucial role in trian-
gulating the twinship and ushering in the phase of antagonism. Mary
wants both to have grandchildren and to keep the twins for herself. So
she perversely encourages the stay-at-home Benjamin to marry and
forbids the more outgoing Lewis. The twins compete for Mary’s love and
she exploits this. Lewis suspects Benjamin and his mother of conspiring
against him, and the relation is explicitly described as a triangle ‘of son,
mother and son’ (172). In her fantasy death scene, Mary sees the twins
‘standing, symmetrically, on either side of the bed’ (156).
From two to three

Mary’s death, half-way through the twins’ life, marks the beginning of
a third stage, and even a stage of threeness, in which third parties cease
to be threatening. At first it looks like a return to the first stage of indis-

tinguishable sameness: in the evening following the funeral, Benjamin
has laid out two identical nightshirts from among their late father’s
clothes, and after their bath (and thenceforth every night for the rest
of their lives) they sleep together in their parents’ bed, ‘[u]nited at last
by the memory of their mother’ in a way that they could not be during
her life (Chatwin, 1982: 183). When the Second World War arrives,
it ‘washe[s] over them without disturbing their solitude’ (183). Now
‘[t]heir wrangles were over. They were inseparable now as they had
been before Benjamin’s childhood illness’ (203). However, they do not
simply retreat happily into narcissistic isolation. Even were it possible
to rebuild their egg-shell, they have no nostalgia for its sterility, for its
lack of future. On the contrary, solitude now dismays them.
The sameness that defines them at this stage does not suppress the
noise of otherness. In fact the twins now welcome others into their
life. Manfred, a German POW, is assigned to work on the farm: ‘A third
cap in the porch, a third pair of boots, a third place at table – all helped
remind them that life had not entirely passed them by’ (188). Lotte,
a Viennese Jew, similarly comes from far outside their Welsh village,
but ‘earned her place as the third person in their lives and ended up
extracting their most intimate secrets’ (192). She persuades Benjamin
to let Lewis buy a tractor, introducing time and technology to the
farm. The tractor becomes Lewis’s woman, another third party (201).
Lotte, who studies twins, tells of how Castor and Pollux ‘both
popped out of the same egg,’ just as Lewis and Benjamin did (192).
Popped out, and presumably broke the egg to do so. And by this stage
in the novel Lewis and Benjamin have come out of their shell. They are
no longer trying to push back the boundaries of the outside world. But
even so, they still feel too closed in on themselves:
The day of their sixtieth birthday was almost a day of mourning.

Each time they tore a page from the calendar, they had forebodings
of a miserable old age. […] How was it possible, they wondered, that
they had come to be alone? (203).
Their solution is to continue to bring others into their life. The most
important of these is Kevin. The twins discover that they have a great-
nephew, grandson of their sister (who had been expelled from the
family home by their father for being pregnant). As children they
rejected their baby sister, but they embrace Kevin and paradoxically it
is for precisely the same reason: he brings otherness into an otherwise
closed relation. He is the source of much happiness, and becomes their

heir. Kevin is their future.
But this threesome does not turn into another form of closure. The
twins continue to make friendships with others. They find a new friend
in Nancy Bickerton, whom Lewis as a child had wanted to marry, now
the only survivor of a family of local gentry. There is also Theo, an
ex-hippy, a tent-dweller who, although very unlike the conservative
Welsh farmers, nonetheless becomes a close third: ‘For all their differ-
ences, Theo and the twins were devoted to one another’ (Chatwin,
1982: 233).
The threesomes formed in this way do not reproduce the triangular
relation with the mother that caused antagonism. If thirdness is expli-
citly what saves the twins from stagnation, they use this otherness
very differently from when their mother was alive. Third parties are no
longer excluded as dangerous elements that might come between the
twins (the first phase), nor are they used to prise apart the twosome
(the second phase). Rather, they are accepted as the noise in the system
that allows the twins room for manoeuvre, as the noise in their rela-
tion that makes them participants in life (‘remind[ing] them that life
had not entirely passed them by’ 188) and opens up their life into a
tellable story. What makes the story tellable is what makes the survival
of the twin relation possible. Third parties become the means for main-
taining the twinship through time, in a way that intersects – but does
not coincide – with work by René Girard and Eve Sedgwick.
Girard (1965) and Sedgwick (1985) examine the classic triangle of
rivalry between men over a woman. Girard shows not only that
mimetic desire gives rise to resemblance between rivals, but also that
the antagonism produces an intense bond between them that eclipses
their attachment to their common object. Sedgwick goes further to
argue that the rivals tend to use the woman, the third term, as an
unavowed means of mediating the homosocial relation between the
men. Thus the third term, the object of desire, while apparently
driving rivals apart, actually serves to bring them together. It is the
means of their relation. Siobhan La Piana takes this yet a step further
in the direction of On the Black Hill when she affirms that twin narrat-
ives ‘make[ ] transparent the homosocial desire that exists in all such
triangles’ (1990: 28). Analysing the films A Zed and Two Noughts and
Dead Ringers, she suggests that the rivalry underlying the mediation
can be eclipsed by the perfect resemblance of twinship (28).
In On the Black Hill, it is as if Lewis and Benjamin (who already
start out with resemblance and an intense bond) gradually take these
arguments on board and make them work to their advantage by learn-

ing to bypass rivalry. At the end of the novel, the third party has
ceased to be an object of desire for Lewis (the threesomes are not erotic
triangles), and has ceased to be a threat to twinship for Benjamin.
Third terms are recognised as the means of survival for their relation.
However, the mediation in On the Black Hill goes beyond the ‘traffic in
women’ (Rubin, 1975) that characterises patriarchal heterosexuality for
Sedgwick, that is to say, ‘the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps
symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds
of men with men’ (Sedgwick, 1985: 26). Unlike Dead Ringers and A Zed
and Two Noughts, the novel does not fall into the pattern identified by
La Piana whereby the brotherhood of twins is used to ‘overpower and
objectify women’ (1990: 32).
A clue to this important difference is already to be found in
Sedgwick’s careful word choice: ‘cementing.’ Patrick White uses this
same metaphor in The Solid Mandala to make a similar – although
ungendered – point about the role of third parties in sustaining
relationships. Early in the novel, Mrs Poulter and Mrs Dun discuss
the twins on the bus: ‘The private lives of other parties act as the
cement of friendship. The Brothers Brown could be about to set the
friendship of the friends’ (White, 1966: 14–15). Cementing indicates
that third parties are used – even exploited – in order to fix bonds.
However, as we have seen, this is precisely not the key to twin sur-
vival. As Tournier’s Gemini warns us, twinship already constitutes a
rigid, heavy bond. There is no need to fasten it further, thus con-
demning the twins to death by stagnation. Indeed, immobilising
bonds could well be the diagnosis of the problem with the threesomes
in twin stories of stagnation. Maria-Barbara, Jean-Paul’s mother in
Gemini, rarely stirs from her chaise longue. She is the ‘maternal plinth’
(1981: 261), the stable base for the twins during their youth, ensuring
continuity and identity. But in reinforcing the closure and immobility
of the twin cell, she also hinders its long-term survival, and the twin-
ship ruptures soon after her disappearance. In A Zed and Two Noughts,
Oliver and Oswald become indistinguishable through their relation
with the bedridden Alba, whose legs are both amputated. As La Piana
remarks, Alba ‘brings the twins together, makes them love each other
through her body’ (1990: 31). However, this mediation too im-
mobilises the twinship, turning it in upon itself, and Alba’s death
is immediately followed by that of the twins. In these cases, the third
term of mediation is used to maintain resemblance by containing
otherness within a closed circuit.25
The situation is rather different at the conclusion of On the Black Hill,

where there is no single third cementing sameness, but a series of
others. Kevin and the friends of both sexes who represent third parties
for Lewis and Benjamin open up the twinship, and expose it to the
otherness that can allow it to survive in (narrative) time. The relation
of sameness thus passes through a number of detours. The dead end
becomes a passage. Sameness and difference have ceased to represent
mutually exclusive categories.
This effect is achieved because the mediation in On the Black Hill is
not an attempt to shore up the circle of twinship. In fact, the prolifera-
tion of third parties in Chatwin’s novel comes to replace the nostalgic
ideals of oneness and completeness. Lewis and Benjamin Jones do not
try to put Humpty together again. This contrasts sharply with The Solid
Mandala and Gemini, in which Arthur in one case and Paul in the other
seek to repair the rupture of the twin relation by recreating its round-
ness. In these two texts, twinship is idealised as totality in the micro-
cosms of Arthur’s mandala and (Jean-)Paul’s bubble.26 Arthur and Paul
strive to include the whole world in their circles. The microcosm spells
safety: after all, if everything is inside, there can be no threat from
outside, for there is no outside. The dream of wholeness and the desire
for closure are thus perpetuated. And through solidity in the one case
and elasticity in the other, Arthur’s marble and (Jean-)Paul’s dilating
bubble are enduring, able to defy the vicissitudes of historical time.
Unlike these representations of wholeness, those in Chatwin’s novel
are fleeting. What is closed breaks open. The bubbles in On the Black
Hill do what bubbles do best: they burst. But then again Chatwin’s
twins do not aspire to immortality. Their survival is a very mortal one.
Lewis is fascinated by airships, the least solid of aircraft. His scrap-
book is full of air disasters, the bursting of these and other bubbles. At
the thanksgiving service at the end of the novel, the minister declares:
‘Our life is a bubble. We are born. We float upwards. We are carried
hither and thither by the breezes. We glitter in the sunshine. Then, all
of a sudden, the bubble bursts and we fall to the earth as specks of
moisture’ (Chatwin, 1982: 246). For the characters in The Solid Mandala
and Gemini, bubbles and baubles that encompass the world without
breaking are the solution to the problems of twinship, but at the price
of not really belonging to this world. In On the Black Hill, life involves
breaking eggs and the risk of bubbles bursting.
A high-point, perhaps the culmination of the life of the Welsh twins,
is a ten minute joy flight over their farm, a present from Kevin for their
eightieth birthday. After Benjamin’s initial terror, he is excited to see
his land, to recognise a friend waving. Lewis gets to hold the controls,
and follows instructions to do a figure-of-eight, then another big loop.
‘Not until he had handed back the controls did Lewis realise that he
had written the figures eight and zero in the sky’ (Chatwin, 1982: 241).
These figures of course celebrate the twins’ eightieth birthday. However
they also put two contiguous loops alongside one big circle: two repres-
entations of the twin relation, but no longer competing with each
other. Traced in the sky and allowed to fade away, they are neither
constraining nor enduring.
And suddenly he felt – even if the engine failed, even if the plane
took a nosedive and their souls flew up to Heaven – that all the
frustrations of his cramped and frugal life now counted for nothing,
because, for ten magnificent minutes, he had done what he wanted
to do. (240)
Lewis Jones manages to fulfil his dream of flying without flying away
from his brother. He manages, for a divine moment, to do what had
seemed impossible. But these twins come back down to earth. This is
not a Dioscuri story of the sharing of immortality. Neither totality nor
eternity is offered, just ten minutes of bliss.
The passage of time is emphasised in On the Black Hill. More than
eighty years are carefully inscribed in the story. Unlike the inalterable
twins of the Castor and Pollux clock against which the time of the
novel is measured, Lewis and Benjamin are not heavenly twins, but
mortal. And the time in which they live not only describes a ‘healing
circle’ but also, like a bubble, ‘br[eaks] into the future’ (Chatwin, 1982:
14). It seems that the twins’ future depends on accepting breakage
without nostalgia so that time can ‘wipe away’ the pains of the past
(14). Their survival depends on renouncing closure and learning to
manoeuvre through time, difference and noise, through the very stuff
of stories.
From the moment of the birth of twins, time introduces différance
and décalage – that tiny discrepancy, gap or time lag – for one twin is
always born before the other. Lewis, the first-born, remains a step
ahead of his brother, even in death. On the day of Lewis’s heart attack,
‘Benjamin had rolled up his shirtsleeves and was scouring egg-yolk
from the plates. In the stone sink, rings of bacon fat had floated to the
surface. He was very excited about Kevin’s baby boy’ (247). Coping
with egg-yolk has become a daily, breakfast occurrence, but the yellow-
ness is still able to herald danger. The rings of fat are prosaic reminders
of the circles of time that break into the future, of the bubbles of life
that glitter and burst: Lewis’s life, Kevin’s baby’s life. There is a surge of
pain in Benjamin’s chest and he knows it is Lewis. This is the price
of mortal existence, but at a ripe age. Outside, a vapour trail bisects the
sky: not the happy fleeting circles of the joy flight, but something
tearing the sky apart.
Benjamin too is bisected. At first, after Lewis’s death, ‘he could
hardly even button his shirt-front’ (248). He cannot put the two halves
together again. Yet he does not pine away or suicide to end the story.
One night, he wanders off and is found next morning at the graveyard,
gazing at his reflection in the blank half of the newest tombstone. The
graveyard becomes his second home. But Benjamin is not pursuing
his brother. He is merely continuing to do what he has learnt: main-
taining the relation through yet another form of mediation, establish-
ing communication across another interval, through another detour
between them. ‘He seems to be quite happy as long as he can spend
an hour in the graveyard each day’ (249).
Telling twins together
New stories are not made from radically new materials. Yarns are spun
from existing stuff, the familiar thread twisted anew. A sediment of
stories needs to be sifted and shifted, before Chatwin’s twins can look
to the future in their old age. In the second half of the twentieth
century, the narrative tradition of doomed twins is repeatedly negoti-
ated. White’s and Tournier’s novels put pressure on the tradition,
sustaining twinship for some sixty years (White), or for more than
600 pages (Tournier, French edition). But White’s twins eventually
succumb to stagnation and fratricide, while Tournier’s only escape the
dangers of narcissism by turning sameness into opposition, and even
then the twins’ survival is doubtful. Ultimately, the only image of hope
they offer is for shared heavenly (rather than earthly) existence
through a synthesis of differences.
Chatwin, on the other hand, reworks the story of sameness until it
becomes tellable as a story of survival. Lewis and Benjamin Jones con-
front and conquer the threats that loom over textual twins. This is
achieved by reconceptualising the sameness that defines them, such
that it no longer excludes difference. The twin pitfalls of stagnation
(the suppression of difference in order to maintain a stultifying same-
ness) and antagonism (a magnification of difference that conceals and
denies similarity) are both products of a binary opposition between
sameness and difference. And Lewis and Benjamin suffer from both
dangers. They learn, however, to integrate difference into the circuit of
sameness without short-circuiting. Reflecting poststructuralist and
postmodernist critical discourses that challenge a dialectical world-
view, their twinship is reconceived as a mediated non-oppositional
relation that allows respect for the other within the same.27 This is
what allows Chatwin’s twins to survive sameness.
On the Black Hill thus offers an alternative both to narcissistic stale-
mate and to dialectical opposition as the fate of the same-sex, lookalike
couple, and it provides a model for narrating a form of coupledom
in which roles need not be clearly differentiated. Perhaps then, there
are other, more optimistic stories to be told of the Bloomfield twins,
with whom we began this chapter, or indeed of other couples who
might identify themselves in terms of shared traits. One of the Bloom-
field articles quotes Mal Bennett from their favourite restaurant, one
of several people who became ‘part of their family’ (Russell, 1996).
Perhaps he knows enough to tell a story in which the egg – their closed
circle of silence and decay – is broken open and made into an omelette.
3
Twins and Sexual Rivalry: Recasting
the Wicked Sister in Thriller Films
Isabella Rossellini stars as Rachel Marks, a top West Coast

fashion model searching for a more satisfying life. Her journey
brings her to the office of therapist Jonathan McEwan (Aidan
Quinn), an honest, sensitive and loving man. The two fall in
love and all is well until Rachel becomes bored. Then she
meets James, Jonathan’s identical twin brother. Identical in
all but character. James is dangerous, untrustworthy and irres-
istible. Rachel finds herself torn between the caution and
the thrills. As she continues down this difficult road, her life
begins to swing completely out of control.
So reads the synopsis on the cover of the video of Lies of the Twins (Tim
Hunter, 1991). Seen it all before? Well, yes and no. The alternative
between the ‘good’ twin and the ‘bad’ (between the sensitive and the
sensuous, between the homemaker and the homebreaker), the imposs-
ibility of telling them apart on occasion, the jealousy that drives one
twin to steal the other’s partner and makes them rivals to the death in
love: these are all familiar to us from films such as:
• A Stolen Life (Paul Czinner, 1939)

• Cobra Woman (Robert Siodmak, 1944)
• A Stolen Life (Curtis Bernhardt, 1946, remake)
• The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
• The Guilty (John Reinhardt, 1947)
• Dead Ringer (Paul Henreid, 1964)
• Twins of Evil (John Hough, 1971)
• Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973)
• Dark Mirror (Richard Lang, 1984, remake for television)
47
• Killer in the Mirror (Frank De Felitta, 1986, remake of Dead Ringer)

• Mirror Images I (Gregory Hippolyte, 1991)
• Twin Sisters (Tom Berry, 1992)
• Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992)
• Doppelganger: The Evil Within (Avi Nesher, 1992)
• Thicker Than Water (Marc Evans, 1993, for television)
• Mirror Images II (Gregory Hippolyte, 1993).1
However Lies of the Twins is the odd man out in this list, precisely
because its twins are men.
What is it about this story that it needs to be told and retold with
frantic frequency? To what can we attribute the sudden abundance of
these films in the early 1990s? More pointedly, why might we want to
tell this familiar story differently? What is involved in transposing
the tale to tell a story of male twins? What kinds of lies does Lies of the
Twins expose? This chapter explores the gender asymmetry to be found
in popular twin films, and analyses the way in which a particular myth
of female sexuality was reworked in the 1990s Hollywood revival of
the 1940s twin sister plot. The characteristic division of women into
virgins and whores clearly needed updating for a new audience for
whom virginity was somewhat less of a prize. Apparently, however,
the categorisation was far too powerful to abandon entirely. Lies of the
Twins is a particularly useful film to study in this light. As a role re-
versal, it both rehearses and shifts the conventions of female twin
films, and in doing so, suggests strategies for rethinking the pernicious
dichotomy that pervades them.
Gender in twin films
Statistically, one in approximately eighty births is a twin birth, such

that twins represent about 2.5 per cent of the population (Zazzo, 1984:
72).2 While no precise figures are available for comparison, twins
certainly abound in film production, featuring in hundreds of films
across a range of genres. While the (frequently mutant) twin wreaks
homicidal havoc in horror (Basket Case I and II, The Dark Half, see
Chapter 4 below), twins separated at birth team up in action films
(Double Impact, Twin Dragons) and in comedy (Twins). The intense rela-
tionship between soul-mate twins provides substance for drama (On the
Black Hill, The Krays, Dominick and Eugene) and leads to stagnation
and decay in art-house films (Dead Ringers, A Zed and Two Noughts; see
Chapter 2). Confusion between lookalike twins is a staple of comedy
Twins and Sexual Rivalry 49
and a popular device in most other genres, but it is worth noting too
the number of films involving non-identical twins (Twins, Dominick
and Eugene, A Zed and Two Noughts).3 Recurrent thriller scenarios in-
volve the hunt for the murderer of one’s twin (Jack’s Back, also the
action film Maximum Risk) and – of most interest to us here – the strug-
gle between good and evil twins (Take Two, Raising Cain, Lies of the
Twins).
All of the examples just cited are recent films about male twins. This
wide range is not found among films featuring other twin pairs.
Indeed, the use of twins in film is strongly gendered. Despite compris-
ing over a quarter of twin births, twins of mixed sex are strangely
absent from film (exceptions being The Prince of Tides, This World Then
the Fireworks). On the other hand, there are plenty of twin sister films,
but these form a rather homogeneous corpus in comparison to twin
brother films. Male twins and female twins are more or less equally
represented in number, but not in kind.
Firstly, as far as we can ascertain, all twentieth-century female twin
films feature identical twins, who (once they are past adolescence) are
played by the same actor.4 And secondly, apart from the occasional
comedy of confusion (such as Big Business) and the recurrent ‘family
entertainment’ plot of twin girls matchmaking for their parents (The
Parent Trap and its remakes),5 the overwhelming majority of these films
are thrillers involving deadly rivalry between good and evil twin sisters.
Moreover, these sisters are always split along the same predictable line
– a version of the virgin/whore dichotomy. In fact, of all the thrillers/
psychological dramas about female twins and doppelgängers available,
we found only two where the twins were not distinguished to some
extent on the basis of their sexual proclivities (A Kiss Before Dying and
The Lookalike).6 Clearly, the conventions for the filmic use of twins are
functions of the interaction of genre and gender.
Evil twin sisters
Female twins and doppelgängers are virtually absent from legend and
literary history, even during the Romantic era. In their studies of twins
and doubles in myth and literature, René Zazzo (1984: 143) and John
Herdman (1991: 14) both comment on the rarity of twin sister stories.
Meanwhile the lack of examples in Otto Rank’s study speaks for itself:
the medieval ‘Le Lai du frêne’ is the only one mentioned, and then in a
section that only appears in the French edition (1973: 100). Robert
Rogers, on the other hand, identifies a tradition of ‘good angel/bad
angel’ pairs of female characters in nineteenth-century literature (1970:

29). Although these are not twins,7 they clearly pave the way for the
filmic representation of good and bad twin sisters.
For twin sisters have become standard fare in twentieth-century film.
There are two privileged moments of this phenomenon: the 1940s
woman’s film and, following a couple of 1980s remakes of the earlier
films, 1990s thrillers. Most of these stories involve a contest between a
good and an evil twin – or more simply the ‘good girl’ and the ‘bad
girl’ – and the problems of telling them apart. One particularity of
female twin films is the frequency with which the bad girl steals her
sister’s husband. Indeed, this is often her primary aim.
Lucy Fischer analyses three woman’s films from the 1940s (Cobra
Woman, A Stolen Life and The Dark Mirror) in which female twins are
‘rivals for the affections of an eligible man’ (1989: 178). In these films,
the ‘good girl’ is passive, self-sacrificing, sweet, demure and truthful,
while the ‘bad girl’ is a femme fatale – sexy, deceptive, competitive and
bold. A further dimension of either insanity or supernatural evil often
adds to the bad twin’s wickedness. As Fischer remarks, ‘the good and
bad twins in the films seem like nothing so much as dichotomised
male projections of opposing views of the Eternal Feminine’ (191), that
is to say, the traditional dichotomy of the virgin and the whore. The
dénouement of these films (the evil twin dies and the good twin gets
back her man) reinforces the idea that good girls are preferred by men
in the long run, and that modesty and virtue are desirable attributes.8
Fischer’s essay concludes with a study of two films that resist this tra-
dition: the experimental The Bad Sister (Laura Mulvey and Peter
Wollen, 1983) which valorises the point of view of the rebellious
bad sister, and Sisters or The Balance of Happiness (Margarethe von
Trotta, 1979) which questions the division of roles and argues instead
for their synthesis. Elsewhere, Fischer also suggests that Desperately
Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) functions as a rewrite of the
canonical good girl/bad girl dichotomy of the 1940s twin dramas
(Fischer, 1990). A comedy of confusion rather than a thriller involving
deadly rivalry, Desperately Seeking Susan shows good girl Roberta finding
her desiring self and a desirable male by playing the part of her bad girl
double, Susan. Rather than representing the good girl’s reward, the
wayward husband is ditched. Sisterhood prevails. Typical of comedies
of confusion (from the Shakespearian comedies to recent popular twin
films such as Big Business) is the film’s resolution whereby neither
twin dies and identities are re-established and stabilised by each twin
having her own partner. Desperately Seeking Susan’s twist on the tale is
that Roberta and Susan were not doubles/twins to begin with.9 In fact,
none of the three recent films studied by Fischer involves twins, but
Fischer makes her point about the possibility of telling sister stories
and good girl/bad girl narratives differently.
However, soon after the time of Fischer’s writing, which coincided
with a couple of remakes of earlier wicked twin sister films, a whole
new crop of female twin films emerged. To the set of films listed at the
beginning of the chapter, which includes only films where the twins
are in conflict over the same man, we could add Double Vision (1992)
and Double Edge (1992), making a total of eight good girl/bad girl twin
films from 1991 to 1993 including five in 1992 alone. These films are
all thrillers of one kind or another: Doppelganger leans towards the
horror genre; Mirror Images I and II fall clearly into the porn category.
They are far from experimental and, unlike Fischer’s choices, are all
directed by men. However, almost all these films follow Desperately
Seeking Susan’s lead in suggesting that something is missing from
the good girl’s life.10 That the good girl/bad girl narrative should have
been reiterated so frequently at this time clearly indicates that this
important cultural myth needed reworking for a 1990s audience.
Revamping the ideal woman
The 1990s thrillers invariably begin by reproducing the traditional

dichotomy of the virgin and the whore, most frequently in the form of
a faithful but frigid, frilly wife and a sexually insatiable call-girl cum
deadly killer, (un)dressed in slinky black. (Both twins almost always
have a father fixation). However, unlike the 1940s films, the 1990s
films do not conclude with a simple triumph of virtue. Rather than
virtue being rewarded, the virtuous twin’s disinterest in sex needs to be
cured. The elimination of the bad sister is not enough. The good girl
needs to realise that she is only half a woman. In order to become
whole, her repressed sexuality must be assumed. She must become a
synthesis of the two twins, combining moral rectitude with a sexual
appetite. In a number of films (Twin Sisters, Mirror Images I and II,
Double Vision), this is achieved by playing the role of her sister and pre-
tending (at the very least) to be a prostitute. It seems you can never tell
when your sweet wife will start playing the whore. But is it possible for
a wife to assume the sexiness of her hooker twin without also acquiring
her deadliness? Perhaps not: husbands seduced by the wicked sister
tend to be appropriately punished in the 1990s films, as the new whole
woman emerges from the wifely twin. There is sometimes even
an element of doubt over the identity of the surviving sister, and the
suggestion is made that now that the two halves are one, it hardly
matters which twin remains. The frisson of danger lingers around the
now sexy (ex-)wife, who could easily revert to the stiletto-heeled,
hairpin- or knife-wielding castrating whore.11
One could be tempted to see the image of this new synthesised
woman as an improvement on the ideal woman of the 1940s.12
It would, however, be an error to regard these films as in any way
rejecting or going beyond the virgin/whore dichotomy. On the con-
trary, they still seem to be prompted by the problem identified by
Freud in ‘A special type of choice of object made by men’ (Freud,
1953–74 Vol. 11: 163–76), that of reconciling the tension between
maternal and erotic images of woman, the same problem that
Wolfenstein and Leites considered pervasive in film in 1950:
The difficulty of choosing between a good and a bad girl is one of

the major problems of love-life in western culture. The problem is to
fuse two feelings which men have found it hard to have in relation
to the same woman. On the one hand, there are sexual impulses,
which a man may feel to be bad, and which he may find it hard
to associate with a woman whom he considers admirable. The
image, and the actuality, of the ‘bad’ woman arises to satisfy sexual
impulses which men feel to be degrading. On the other hand, there
are affectionate impulses evoked by women who resemble the man’s
mother or sister, ‘good’ women. A good girl is the sort that a man
should marry, but she has the disadvantage of not being sexually
stimulating.
There are various possible solutions to this conflict. The attempt
may be made to satisfy one of these impulses at the expense of the
other, to satisfy them both but in different directions, or to combine
the two impulses in a single relationship (1950: 25–6).
Both the 1940s and the 1990s female twin films can be seen as at-
tempts to solve the same conflict, opting respectively for the first and
the third of the solutions mentioned.
Wicked twin brothers
By contrast, in films about male twins, the good twin/bad twin dich-
otomy is configured quite differently. Rather than the virgin and the
whore, male twins tend to be distinguished on the basis of attributes
such as lawfulness, altruism, family values, worldliness and physical

prowess. Jack’s Back, for example, contrasts an altruistic, civic-minded
medical student with his ex-marine twin who has a vaguely specified
criminal past and is familiar with the underworld of petty crime. Steal
Big Steal Little pitches compassionate, family-oriented Ruben against
his corrupt and greedy twin Robby. Maximum Risk involves an honest
cop/gangster pair. In The Dark Half, a family man must prevent his
sadistic, boozing alter ego (the psychic vestige of his unborn twin)
from committing further murders. And in Raising Cain, a respected
psychologist, loving husband and devoted father adopts one of his
multiple personalities – an aggressive, violent ‘twin’ – to murder
women and steal their children. The hustler is a favourite bad boy
figure: in action films he is a kickboxer contrasted with either a concert
pianist (Twin Dragons) or an aerobics instructor (Double Impact). In
Twins, a decidedly unathletic small-time hustler teams up with his
genetically perfect twin: strong and true but hopelessly naive. Even in
Dead Ringers, where the twins are much less clearly delineated, they are
still distinguished along similar lines: Elliot’s worldliness (both in
attaining professional prestige and in finding bedfellows) is juxtaposed
with Bev’s altruistic commitment to research. Sexual shyness occasion-
ally comes into the equation, as in Dead Ringers, where it does not
dominate, or in Equinox in which a Mafia underling brushes with his
excruciatingly timid twin, who, as is often the case with antithetical
female twins, is sexually fearful.13 However, in general, the dichotomy
between male twins does not oppose sexual appetite to sexual inhibi-
tion, innocence or circumspection. The contrast between the family
man and his evil twin (as in The Dark Half and Raising Cain) is more
likely to be made on the basis of violence than of sexual behaviour.
Although we can distinguish a good twin and a bad twin in these
films, the bad boy is frequently not so much wicked as just a little
wayward. Furthermore, in many of these films, the twin relation is not
predominantly one of rivalry, but involves a large element of coopera-
tion. Certainly this is the case in the comedies and action films (Twins,
Twin Dragons, Double Impact), but is also true of thrillers and horror
films like Jack’s Back, Basket Case and Dead Ringers. The deadly antag-
onism between good and evil twins, omnipresent in female twin films,
is not the only scenario among the lads: brotherhood frequently tri-
umphs.14 Meanwhile sisterhood among filmic twins is virtually absent.
And where there is mortal combat between brothers, it is very rare to
find it shaped as competition over a love interest.15 In sharp contrast
to the number of female twin films rehearsing this story, there are very
few examples among recent male twin films. There is Take Two, but
in this film it is the good twin who falls for his brother’s wife and
attempts to save her from him.16 There is Dead Ringers, but from the
start Elliot’s desire to share Claire with Bev is never a contest for her
love but an attempt to preserve a symbiotic twin relation based on
the identity of their experiences, and his death is not the result of a
fratricidal struggle.
And then there is Lies of the Twins. In this male twin film, the broth-
ers are distinguished as much by their attitude to sex as by their altru-
ism: the bad boy steals his brother’s de facto; and the twins fight to the
death to possess her. Lies of the Twins is thus highly unusual among
male twin films, but reworks all the classic elements of female twin
films.
Erotic triangles
Of course, this is not to say that men are never rivals in love. Indeed
René Girard’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel and Eve Sedgwick’s Between
Men examine celebrated literary examples of such triangles. Another
famous literary case to which we will have occasion to return is
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. When Anna leaves her husband for lover
Vronsky, she is shunned by society and forbidden from seeing her son.
Sleepless with unhappiness, she turns to opium before finally throwing
herself under a train. Brief Encounter, Dr. Zhivago and From Here to
Eternity are examples of classic films showing a woman torn between
two men, between husband and lover, duty and delight. However, the
male rivals in love are rarely represented as brothers, let alone twins.
In fact, Girard and Sedgwick show the extent to which the (increasing)
resemblance between the rivals is dissimulated in such texts. On the
other hand, as we have seen, rival women are regularly portrayed as
virtually indistinguishable: as twins, they are hard to tell apart, and can
be mistaken for one another.
This is a significant difference, for whereas the man over whom the
female twins tussle has a perfect excuse for his infidelity – he was
seduced by a woman who was the spitting image of his wife – the
female object of male rivalry has no such justification. Female twin
rivals provide their man with an improvement on the excuse of being
led astray by the temptress: he can hardly be blamed if the siren
he beds looks exactly like his wife, if indeed she seems to be merely the
dark side of his enigmatic woman. Women, however, have no excuse
for waywardness, and cannot simply be tricked in this way into
infidelity. Instead they are faced with clear-cut moral choices, the con-
sequences of which are fully understood. For women in this position,
there must be no ambiguity in the distinction between virtuous sobri-
ety and sinful pleasure, no hint that husband and lover are in a sense
the same man in a different light. Anna Karenina has no-one to blame
but herself.
Lies of the Twins: a role reversal
It is against this background of films and other narratives that we

propose to read Lies of the Twins. This is a film that reproduces the
idiom of twin films but does so in a way that reads against the standard
stories of male and female twins and rivals. Most obviously, this
appears as a gender reversal: like so many twin sister films, this is a
story about jealous rivalry over a love interest, but here the twins are
brothers. However, the film also points to competing strategies for
the interpretation of twins and, by extension, twin films: strategies we
might call psychological and discursive.
Jonathan and James McEwan are identical twin psychiatrists, both
played by Aidan Quinn. They cannot be distinguished physically,
although close attention reveals that James wears a gold ring most of the
time. Jonathan is devoted to his job, donating his services one day a
week at a public clinic, and ready to make sacrifices in his personal life
and even to interrupt romantic evenings to be available to his patients.
Rachel has difficulty in dragging him away not only from his patients
but from his lecturing and research for a night of sex and romance.
James, on the other hand, is keen to take time off in the middle of the
day for sex with Rachel and is interested in variations on standard rou-
tines: sex on the car bonnet under the flight path near the airport; anal
sex in a seedy downtown hotel. His interest in his profession is said to
consist primarily in ‘act[ing] out his own manipulative fantasies with
clients,’ and we certainly see a sadistic side to him in his dealings with
Rachel. And unlike the monogamous Jonathan, James has an unspecified
number of girlfriends. Although James is self-seeking and somewhat
violent in contrast with Jonathan’s altruism and equanimity, interest in
sex seems to be the main basis for distinguishing between the twins. The
dichotomy between virtue and debauchery as represented by Jonathan
and James is probably as close as we are likely to get to a male equivalent
of the virtuous wife and the whore.
Does this indicate a split in the male psyche, as psychoanalytical
interpretations of the double often suggest?17 Or are the twins evidence
of a female split, and conjured forth by Rachel’s conflicting desires for

stability and excitement?18 Above all, we would argue that they rep-
resent a rewrite: a quotation and displacement of a familiar duality.
For Jonathan and James are not the only pair of characters in the film.
Equally important is the relation between the two fashion models,
Rachel (Isabella Rossellini) and Elle (played by Iman). And the close-
ups that sweep up Rachel’s body to her face, the prominence of
sequences involving modelling shoots and the obtrusive sound of
cameras clicking on the soundtrack all draw attention to the fact that,
in an important sense, this is a film about images of women.
The film’s opening sequence shows the two women engaged in a
poolside conversation about Rachel’s new romantic interest, Jonathan.
The conversation ends with Elle’s question ‘When do you move in?’ to
which Rachel replies, ‘As soon as he asks.’ Cut to a garden wedding
scene. The very pale Rachel is a traditional bride all in white, the white
flowers in her hair adding to the virginal look. She smiles in the direc-
tion of Jonathan entering the garden from her right. Enter from left,
on the same axis as Jonathan, Elle, whose name is a third person
pronoun – the archetypal other woman. Elle is black and dressed in
black. Jonathan and Elle both stride toward centre. But this is not
Jonathan and Rachel’s wedding (they do not marry, but rather live
together) and Elle is not the evil twin ready to pounce on the unsus-
pecting husband. Rachel is at work, modelling, and this is a shoot. And
Elle and Jonathan do not confront each other but each meet and have
a conversation with Gil, the women’s agent. The filmic conventions
of black and white clothing to denote and distinguish good and evil
characters, which date back to the hats in westerns, are regularly repro-
duced in female twin films.19 Here, however, they are quoted and dis-
placed. They work in this film as a kind of ‘not-statement’ (Freadman,
1988): this is not a good girl/bad girl film; it positions itself in relation
to and against such films. Elle is never a rival but a friend, and far from
playing the ‘bad girl,’ advises Rachel to play it safe. Rachel and Elle, as
not good/bad girl twins, are the foil against which we understand
Jonathan and James.
In this film then, the other woman is not an enemy to eliminate. In
fact, she is a supportive listener. And not only does Lies of the Twins
open with a tête-à-tête between Rachel and Elle, but the final conversa-
tion in the film is another exchange between the same women on the
same subject. This framing shows us the storytelling situation: this is
a story told by a woman to a woman. It is a woman’s story, possibly a
feminist one.20
Ross Chambers, in Story and Situation and Room for Maneuver, shows
how a story can figure its own reading. Elle, as listener, as addressee of
the story, is one such figure for reading, although, as we shall see, not
the only one. Her feedback to Rachel shows that she, like the rest of us,
is familiar with twin stories. She knows how they tend to end. Thus
she advises caution regarding bad boy James (‘You stay away from
James’), is aware that psychiatrists often turn out to be mad doctors
(‘Maybe he [Jonathan] needs a psychiatrist’), and affirms that the ideal
is now a synthesis of sweetness and sexiness when she quips, ‘Maybe
these days it takes two of them to make one real man.’ Elle even
nudges the action on to a classic dénouement by providing Rachel
with its means: the gun with which one twin will kill the other. She
figures our expectations. And when the ending veers away from
the predictable pattern, she’s as delighted for Rachel as we are (we, the
authors of this chapter, at any rate).
Rachel turns to Elle for advice when she is faced with the choice
between the stability of Jonathan and the excitement of James. All else
is equal. Torn between a good boy and a bad boy that you can hardly
tell apart, what’s a girl to do? Before she can decide, Rachel must dis-
cover the secret of the twins’ estrangement, a secret called Sandra
Shearer – the name of a woman, and the name of a story. Finally,
Sandra’s mother recounts this story of crime and punishment to
Rachel. Ten years earlier, Sandra had been in a similar predicament to
Rachel’s. As Jonathan’s fiancée, she was seduced by James. When
Jonathan could not forgive her, she attempted suicide. Now a living
vegetable, the only reminder of her former attractiveness is her black
hair – cut into a fringed bob identical to Rachel’s.
Clearly, turning the tables such that the virgin/whore dichotomy is
for once applied to men is not sufficient to remove the labels from
women. Even when transposed on to men, the virgin/whore opposi-
tion is reflected back on to female characters. Thus in the Sandra
Shearer story, it is not the bad boy but the woman who is punished
for adultery. Just because here the men are divided into faithful fiancé
and philanderer doesn’t mean that the woman can escape the good
girl/bad girl routine.
Sandra Shearer may be the twins’ secret, but variants of the story are
well known under other names. When Rachel seems to be following
this script, losing sleep over the dilemma of choosing between the
twins, Gil, her agent, recognises it instantly: ‘Enough of this Anna
Karenina!’ Gil is the other important figure for reading (in) the film,
and through this exclamation he offers Rachel some very helpful
advice: pick another story, play another role – which ultimately Rachel
does. Gil as reader invites comparison with the traditional figure of the
doctor in the woman’s film. In the garden wedding shoot at the begin-
ning of the film, he provides Jonathan with a job description: as an
agent for fashion models, he becomes ‘their father, their friend, their
confessor, their confidant.’ As Jonathan notes, in some ways he is like a
doctor or psychiatrist, but with very beautiful clients. Gil’s reply puts
Jonathan back in the patient position – ‘Sometimes beautiful women
attract the wrong kind of men, don’t you think?’ – and from the start
the two professions are seen to be in competition. Later, Gil will say to
Rachel: ‘I know he’s a shrink but …. if you have a problem, you come
to me, alright?’
According to Mary Ann Doane, the doctor is the traditional figure for
reading woman in the woman’s film. Moreover, in female twin films,
because the twins are identical, ‘a psychiatrist is needed to see through
the surface exterior to the interior truths of the two sisters’ (Doane,
1984: 74).21 In other words, the doctor is the one who is able to dia-
gnose the good or evil lurking deep beneath the deceptive sameness of
the twins’ appearance. In Lies of the Twins, however, it is the doctor
twins who need to be deciphered and diagnosed. James nonetheless
continues to speak from a position of presumed authority, and alludes
to the hidden truth of the subject with comments such as ‘In sex
we become our true selves,’ even locating Rachel’s beauty at a level
beneath the skin (‘Your true talent is bone structure’). Meanwhile, in a
mise en abyme of our interpretative situation, Gil presents a theory
of reading that cuts across the doctor’s to engage with the specificity of
film. Gil’s way of reading stands in neat contrast to a psychoanalytical
X-ray vision of truth: ‘I only know the surface, just what I can see. […]
I deal with surfaces every hour. And you can look at a surface and tell a
great deal. And after all, that’s what we have to look at, isn’t it?’ Rather
than deep feelings or expressions of true selves, Gil sees the ‘trans-
parency of emotion in your face.’ Whereas the medical practice of
reading requires arcane knowledge and uses institutional authority to
deliver weight to its pronouncements on hidden truths of character,
Gil’s reading practice, whereby he looks carefully at the images before
him, is available to all. In particular, it is available to film-viewers who,
like Gil with his photographic images, have only the surface of the
screen to look at. And it is available to Rachel. This point in the film
marks the low point in her career – the twins are interfering with her
work to the point where she is stood down from modelling until she
sorts herself out – but Gil’s comments also mark a turning point in that
they provide Rachel with the means to read and solve her problem. For
as we shall see, it is by no longer seeking invisible inner truth but by
focusing on the surface as Gil does – by focusing on the identical
appearance of the twins – that Rachel extricates herself from her
predicament.
In fact, the importance of surfaces and images and their relation to
truth has been in play throughout the film and is merely made explicit
by Gil’s theory of reading. The very first shots in the opening sequence
show Elle in the limpid waters of the swimming pool, in which depth
is not hidden but transparently clear. Only a slight refraction – a quirk
of light – distinguishes surface and depth. Beside the pool, anchored by
bowls of fruit, is an assortment of glossy magazine covers featuring the
models. The camera lingers on these and then on the two models, lan-
guishing poolside, in such a way that the images on screen appear as
further posed shots, continuous with the cover photos and still lifes.
At regular intervals during the film we see the models at work, posing,
quoting the clichés of twin films in a distancing and even parodic way.
Thus Rachel at different moments portrays both the schoolmistress
and the leather-clad bikie. And counterbalancing the wedding shoot,
Rachel is all in black with the car and motorbike while Elle is a blonde
in a silver jacket. Good girl and bad girl roles and images are equally
available to be assumed by the same woman on different occasions.
Rather than evidence of a deep psychical split between dark desires and
innocence, the choice of costume represents culturally determined
discursive possibilities.22 And if Gil remarks to Rachel, ‘That girl’s not
you, she’s an image,’ there is no suggestion that a ‘real you’ exists or
what it might be, for what we have – ‘all’ we have – are images, sur-
faces. Thus, even when the models are not at work – reclining around
the pool, taking in the art exhibition, Rachel lying on the psychiatrist’s
couch although she was told it wasn’t necessary – their stylised bodily
attitudes present us with yet more poses.
Even James reinforces this idea at one point. After her first experi-
ence of anal sex, Rachel says, ‘I feel like I’ve dissolved; I feel that there
isn’t any me any more,’ to which James replies, ‘Where did you get
the idea there was any you to begin with?’ If, as he stated earlier, we
become our true selves in sex, then the truth of the self is that there is
no self.
Through juxtaposing sequences from Rachel’s professional and
personal lives, the film shows the circular relation between images
and identity. In one instance, good boy Jonathan’s comment ‘I like
sexy schoolteachers’ is taken up in the shoot of Rachel as pert
schoolmistress with adoring pupils: that is to say, Jonathan’s sexual

fantasy is seen to prompt the image. However, images are equally cues
for sexual behaviour. Thus Rachel’s languorous modelling on the car
and motorbike is a rehearsal for bad boy James’ seduction on the
car bonnet. Clearly images, fantasies and behaviour, Rachel’s model-
ling and ‘real life’ are not essentially different, but feed into each other
and work together in elaborating and maintaining identities.23 Like
Rachel, Jonathan and James are not making up the script as they go
along but are participating in available scenarios. And Rachel shows
that she is equally capable of playing leading roles in a number of
dramas. The parallels between Rachel’s modelling and her relations
with the twins show that we cannot look through deceptive poses to
see the real person, but rather that Rachel’s character is as much a
textual surface as her magazine spreads are.
Rachel thus blurs the divide between image and reality, between
surface and depth, between lies and truth, in favour of a discursive
understanding of the self. And her disturbance of classic dichotomies
extends to that between beauty and brains. Rachel is no bimbo: she
knows her Voltaire, uses Latin expressions and shows a knowledge of
foreign languages (and there too, clear divides are not maintained:
JONATHAN. – ‘So you speak five languages?’ RACHEL. – ‘I mix different
languages’). She is moving into the business side of modelling, under-
takes library research on twin phenomena, and quotes Dr Gail Minor’s
‘postfeminist’ book back to its author.
The latter exchange is a revealing one. Firstly, Dr Minor shows that
she has a script all worked out for Rachel’s life. Rachel refuses it, but
having no readily available substitute story, can only do so rather
tersely:
DR MINOR—A model?
JONATHAN—Well not for long.
DR MINOR—Are you taking courses or are you planning another
career?
RACHEL—No.
Rachel, however, retaliates with her own recognition of a role.

Dr Minor’s catty dismissal of modelling as a serious career for a woman
while she fawns on Jonathan invites the following reading:
RACHEL—Do you know what I like best about your book? It’s when
you talk about the need for we older women to accept ourselves and
not fall into what I think you call the pathetic trap of constant
flirtation in order to gain reassurance of our desirability.
Dr Minor, in falling into this ‘pathetic trap,’ is acting out a common

story. The fact that she has identified it and analysed its power does
not protect her from rehearsing it. Rachel complains to Jonathan:
‘They don’t think what I do is real. They talk to me like I’m a pet.’ The
film makes the point that the role-play involved in modelling is no less
real and no less scripted than the everyday role-play we all engage in as
we participate in stories that shape our lives. As for being a pet, well
pets need not be servile – Rachel’s next shoot has her modelling with a
tiger.
If Rachel dismantles oppositions, James has a stake in maintaining
them. After all, he has a big investment in the good twin/bad twin scen-
ario. His explanation of the twin relation aims to distinguish clearly
between the brothers. But while insisting on their profound psycholo-
gical difference, he shows Rachel photos that do nothing to support his
argument. He has to point himself out: ‘I’m on the left, always. See,
there’s always one dominant twin, Rachel, usually the first born. […]
The problem for Jonathan is that we’re not identical.’24 On the other
hand, the problem for Rachel (and for the viewer) is that they are
indeed identical: ‘He called and he said, “It’s Jonathan.” It was his sick
idea of a joke. For a moment, I did not know. I really did not know.’
James argues for a fixed polarity for each twin: dominant/weak,
exciting/predictable. Clear binaries such as these make for clear-cut
choices and James seeks to persuade Rachel that she is free to make
an informed choice between dating him and settling for Jonathan.
To some extent, this is to present Rachel with the Anna Karenina
dilemma: women must make fully conscious choices and pay dearly
for them. However Lies of the Twins does more than put Rachel in a
position to choose: it re-examines the whole notion of choice. Thus
James’ insistence on Rachel’s control of her destiny is coupled with an
attempt at seduction that undermines it: ‘You’re a free agent, you’re
free to go, you’re free to stay, in fact you’re free tonight, aren’t you?’
Rachel’s free choice is even less obvious when James declares imperi-
ously ‘I’ll decide when it’s over.’ Later, when Rachel refuses to see him,
he makes the dubious assertion that ‘Nothing will happen to you that
isn’t an expression of your own desire.’ The psychiatrist’s supposedly
superior insight into Rachel’s deep desires tells him that ‘no’ really
means ‘yes.’ While insisting that Rachel is free to choose, James claims
to know what she wants better than she does.
In female twin films, men tend not to find themselves in Rachel’s

situation. They tend not to be told that they are in a position to make
a well-informed choice. Indeed they are usually able to avoid this
predicament by proposing the classic male excuse for infidelity – being
duped and seduced by the evil temptress. The plea is made all the more
plausible through the twins’ resemblance: the siren transformed herself
into the image of their wife. Because Lies of the Twins reverses gender in
retelling this familiar twin story, Rachel tries to take this line. After all,
James impersonated Jonathan on a couple of occasions and sent
flowers with merely his initial to indicate the donor. But while the
Bette Davis characters from earlier films are prepared to swallow this
excuse from unfaithful husbands, it won’t wash with James. He shows
a sudden concern to make an honest woman of Rachel:
RACHEL—You tricked me into hurting him enough already.

JAMES—How could I trick you? When you knew who I was already.
You just can’t be honest with yourself, can you?
Although Rachel is aware of which twin she is having sex with (in
moments of passion, she calls out the appropriate name), she has a
more subtle understanding of her capacity for free choice in this situa-
tion: ‘You know, it’s like a drug. You know it’s going to kill you but
you see it laid out there and you find yourself going toward it as if you
had no will. And I hate him then, I really do.’ She tries to resist, with
some success:
ELLE—How long has it been now?

RACHEL—Since you left. Three weeks and he hasn’t called.
ELLE—How about calling him?
RACHEL—I fight it and I’m getting stronger every day.
But, like Anna Karenina on morphine, Rachel gets hooked on James. It

starts interfering with her professional life: turning up for work with
dark rings under her eyes, she is asked, ‘Do you think we’re shooting a
spot for a rehab centre?’
The drug metaphor exposes not only the dynamics of freedom and
enslavement but the fact that James is a bad habit. And habits –
whether drugs or discourses – are persistent. Even Gil’s helpful advice
‘Enough of this Anna Karenina’ is followed by ‘Take a pill if you have
to, but sleep!’ which was of course precisely how Tolstoy’s leading
lady tried to fix her insomnia. Anna Karenina is obviously a hard
discursive habit to kick. Gil’s solution is at best a methadone pro-

gramme. The substitute story he suggests still involves dependency.
His words about surfaces, on the other hand, are more empowering, as
we shall see.
Rachel decides to level with both twins, and then leave town. Having
been threatened by James, she packs a gun. Arriving at James’ office,
she is confronted by both twins, both claiming to be Jonathan. For
the first time, all three characters are together. The triangle is clear: the
symmetry of the split screen with one twin on each side (Figure 3.1)
and the reverse shots of Rachel establish its three points. From
the twins’ point of view, all Rachel has to do is to choose the real
Jonathan. But the scene is shot primarily from Rachel’s point of view
as she swings her head, looking from one twin to the other, and
neither she, nor we, can tell them apart. We do not see James’ gold
ring in this scene or for the rest of the film. Wonderful of course to
be in the position of choice – and with such a wide range to choose
from! The joke is on us as we try in vain to distinguish Aidan Quinn
from Aidan Quinn.
Figure 3.1 Aidan Quinn plays Jonathan and James McEwan in Lies of the Twins
Source: © 1991 Universal Studios All Rights Reserved
But aided by Gil’s theory of reading – what you see is what you get –
Rachel looks at the surface rather than probing it for the hidden truth
of good and evil. She sees what the camera sees, what we see: ‘Stop.
I don’t care who you are. I don’t love either of you. You’re the same
person in a different light. You can’t love anybody but each other.
I was just a mirror between you.’
The unstated basis of female twin films – indeed of the virgin/whore
dichotomy more generally – is the fact that, in Lucy Fischer’s words,
‘the same woman can be regarded in contradictory ways’ (1989: 190).
But unlike the majority of female twin films, Lies of the Twins is refresh-
ingly upfront in exposing the sameness of its antithetical twins. In
turning the discourse around to focus on male twins, Lies of the Twins
draws attention to the transparent truth that the twins are the same.
The obvious fact that we are usually seduced into forgetting is that
good boy and bad boy are played by the same actor, just as Rachel
plays good and bad girls for the camera. And just as Rachel’s photo-
graphic images reflect different fantasies, so the twins are ‘the same
person in a different light.’
As for ‘You can’t love anybody but each other,’ Rachel understands
as clearly as Eve Sedgwick that the seemingly enviable situation of
being courted by two rivals leaves her only a supporting role in a
drama being played out between men. She is merely an object of
exchange used to mediate the competitive twin relation. Any doubt as
to the accuracy of Rachel’s reading is put to rest when the twins vio-
lently shove her aside to grapple with each other. If Rachel will not
choose, they will sort it out between themselves and make the choice
for her. There’s a shot. Rachel blacks out. When she comes round, one
twin is dead and one is left. He says he’s Jonathan and adds: ‘It’s just
me now.’ Rachel need only accept him as the winner of a contest
in which she is the prize. Lingering doubts about the true identity of
‘Jonathan’ – James may still be lurking under that face – could only
pep up the relationship.
But the teasing uncertainty of this nonetheless predictable ending
doesn’t tempt Rachel. She doesn’t fall for the line ‘It’s just me now.’
There are plenty of others. The binary choice that the twins sought to
impose was never the only game in town. She explains to Elle that
she’s off to Europe for work, earning pots of money.
RACHEL—I couldn’t go back. In a way I loved them both, especially

Jonathan, but I really didn’t know them, until the end and then it
was too late. They could never get free of each other.
ELLE—Men!
RACHEL—Jonathan spoke about the great souls and James only liked
the gutter. In the end…
ELLE—Yes?
RACHEL—In the end, I go back to work and go out with a rock star.
The ending Rachel chooses is that of a modern fairy-tale that valorises

the professional activity of women. It fulfils all the formal require-
ments of a happy ending – fame, fortune, success and romance –
however it seems to be grafted from some other story on to this one.
It is as if Rachel picks up and adapts the ending from another script in
another genre. With the reversal of gender, the female twin thriller
ceases to provide an adequate template for telling the story of sexual
rivalry, and Lies of the Twins is obliged to borrow from other genres of
representation – notably fashion photography – that impose alternat-
ive conventions for reading. Through changing her interpretative prac-
tice, Rachel effects a shift away from the good twin/bad twin story.
Rather than learning the deep truth of good and evil and of her
own desires, she sticks with the surface, even the superficial – money,
fame, modelling – and it suits her just fine. In the final scene, Rachel
leaves flowers on ‘James’s’ grave. ‘Jonathan’ rubs a strangely ringless
spot on his finger and smiles, unseen. But who cares which twin
survived – Rachel is moving on.
Lies of the Twins thus concludes in a satisfyingly different way from
other stories of twinship and rivalry. Whereas female twin films tend to
address the dilemma of the good girl/bad girl choice in their conclusions,
either through the triumph of virtue or the synthesis of sweetness and
sexiness, Lies of the Twins exposes rather than resolves this dilemma.
It exposes the pretence – the lie – that there is any real choice involved in
choosing between the good and the bad. If Wolfenstein and Leites iden-
tify three solutions to the good girl/bad girl question, Lies of the Twins
offers a different response: torn between the virtuous fiancé and his
wicked twin, Rachel ultimately turns away from both twins. She refuses
to be forced into making binary moral choices or into accepting choices
made on her behalf. For her, ultimately, it’s double or nothing where the
twins are concerned, and if it interferes with her work, better that it
be nothing. Rather than solving the good boy/bad boy dilemma, Rachel
recognises it for what it is and manages to walk away from it. She
stops probing it as an inner conflict and treats it as a bad habit. The recog-
nition of the split as a discursive rather than a psychological issue makes
it possible to refuse and retreat from the dichotomy.
Lies of the Twins rewrites the classic dénouement of female twin films
(the romantic reward of the good twin) and also positions itself against
the story of woman’s downfall (the Sandra Shearer/Anna Karenina
story) by insisting on an interpretative practice informed by work on
photography. Thus when a powerful story starts colonising her life,
Rachel brings to bear the skills of her trade – an understanding of
the composition, use and circulation of images – in order to shift its
ending. In this sense, Rachel, too, is a figure for reading (in) the film,
one who reminds us that our interpretative practice opens a space for
telling stories differently.
Twins and the split image of woman
Twins are commonly employed by the imagination to incarnate the

binary oppositions that dominate our thinking. Given the range of
possibilities, the narrowness of the portrayal of female twins in film is
remarkable. Invariably the stuff of thrillers, twentieth-century twin
sister films repeatedly play off a wifely and a wanton twin, rivals for
the attention of a man.
Fifty years of social change separate the swarm of twin sister films in
the 1990s from their 1940s precursors. The sudden rush to retell the sister
story towards the close of the twentieth century indicates a pressing need
to rework certain aspects of the tale of the chaste woman and the hussy.
In the process a clear moral tale becomes a little muddied, but the un-
derlying myth – that women are defined and divided by their sexual
behaviour – survives. Bolstered by centuries of tales of fair maidens and
treacherous temptresses, the division is not easily relinquished. If
the 1990s’ heroines manage to incorporate both dangerously alluring
voluptuousness and virtue, it is important to understand that this is not a
rejection of the virgin/whore opposition itself, but a refinement in
its application. The split does not lose its power to divide. The new
imperative is for one woman to be able to fulfil both roles on occasion.
Lies of the Twins is alone among 1990s twin films in going further in
its repudiation of the myth, but in order for this to occur, the gender
of the protagonists is transposed. The film does not address the cus-
tomary female split but figures a parallel male one. It is as if the
virgin/whore dichotomy can only be depicted as a false choice when it
is transferred to a non-traditional object. Only where the myth has no
hold can we walk away from it.
Despite its innovative twists and our optimistic reading of them,
Lies of the Twins hardly marks a turning-point in popular film
representations of gender roles. Its departure from the tried formulae

of twin films is subtle. Despite the preceding decades of feminism, it
marks not a dismantling of the virgin/whore dichotomy in popular
film but a somewhat tentative challenge to its continuing power. We
are left to wonder whether a future spate of female twin films will
ever manage to recast the wicked sister.
4
Twins and the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’:
Patterns in Body Horror Cinema
Conjoined twin brothers in horror
In the decade preceding the revival of wicked twin sister films

discussed in Chapter 3, we start to find another recurrent pattern in
film, this time involving brothers, but not just any twin brothers. From
the early 1980s until the mid-1990s, conjoined twins (once known as
‘Siamese’ twins due to the celebrity of the nineteenth-century brothers
Chang and Eng) repeatedly appear in the horror genre. This in itself is
not surprising, given the history of their depiction as monsters of one
sort or another. What is surprising is the insistent way in which
the brother story is used to tell a mother story. The brothers’ bodies are
shown to be umbilically connected, and the twin relation substitutes
for another relation dating from the womb: a maternal one.
The emergence of this striking pattern can be related to more general
developments in the horror genre in the 1980s that reflect the destabil-
isation of traditional masculine identities: the male body is ruptured,
becomes permeable, even feminised. At the same time, the pattern is a
highly specific configuration of era, genre, gender and topos. The
representation of the twin relation as maternal does not occur before
this period, or in prose genres,1 in film genres other than horror, with
female twins, or with non-conjoined twins. During the 1980s and
1990s, however, conjoined twin brothers can be seen to provide a
particularly clear opportunity for film-makers to feminise the male
body, to display it as monstrously maternal. The topos seems to lend
itself to the rehearsal of cultural anxieties concerning masculinity.
The intertwining of the theme of maternity and the topos of con-
joined twins is evident to a greater or lesser extent in Basket Case (Frank
Henenlotter, 1981), A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985),
68
Twins and the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’ 69
Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988), Basket Case II (Henenlotter,

1990), The Krays (Peter Medak, 1990) and The Dark Half (George
Romero, 1993). Although these films range from art-house to schlock
classics, they are all associated to a degree with horror. During this
period, the link between conjoined twins and the maternal becomes
prevalent in horror to the point where it is parodied in an episode
of the cult television series The X-Files (1995), and where an attempt
to refocus the story of fraternal attachment as a love story (Twin Falls
Idaho, Michael and Mark Polish, 1999) requires constant deflection
of the motherhood story.
This chapter discusses the gendering of conjoined twin films, traces
the representation of fraternity as maternity in the most overt ex-
amples, and relates it to the evolution of the horror genre. Then, in a
reading of the way in which Twin Falls Idaho seeks to distance con-
joined twins from horror, it demonstrates just how insistent this
pattern has become by the end of the twentieth century.
Genre and gender
Although the birth of female conjoined twins is considerably more

common than that of their male counterparts (70 per cent of surviving
sets are female [Sanders, 2003; cf. Bryan, 1992: 59]), there are very few
films featuring female conjoined twins, and those that do exist follow
the virgin/whore pattern analysed in the previous chapter. The rare
examples include Brian de Palma’s Sisters, in which sweet Danielle
and murderous Dominique are separated by Dr Emile. Avi Nesher’s
Doppelganger similarly involves bodily joining and disjoining, although
the lookalike in this case is an alter ego rather than a twin. While these
two films tend towards the horror end of the spectrum, they share con-
cerns that are entirely continuous with those of the twin sister thrillers
in which good girl/bad girl twins are deadly rivals over a man. Even the
pornographic film Joined: The Siamese Twins, constrained by the video
classification system to eschew the violence of the thrillers, manages to
dichotomise its conjoined twins as sexually adventurous and sexually
reticent.2
On the other hand, late twentieth-century films exploring the phys-
ical attachment (and detachment) of male twins’ bodies share their
own set of concerns, not only distinct from those of female twin films
but setting them apart from other male twin films in their focus on
maternity and their proximity to the horror genre. Dead Ringers, Basket
Case and The X-Files are the most revealing examples, and allow us to
analyse the ways in which the twins are connected both to each other
and to cultural developments in the 1980s.
Dead Ringers (Cronenberg): ‘a view from the womb’
Dead Ringers (1988) may seem an odd inclusion in this corpus, for each
of the twin gynaecologists, Elliot and Beverly Mantle, ostensibly has
his own, intact body. Fantasmatically, however, the two bodies are
inextricably joined. Thus in Beverly’s nightmare, the twins are con-
nected by a band of flesh resembling a giant umbilical cord passing
from one belly to the other, that Claire, the woman who comes
between them, severs with her teeth. Additional footage, not included
in the final cut, apparently even shows ‘a quarter size parasitic figure of
Bev growing out of his own abdomen’ (Humm, 1997: 82). Further-
more, Beverly claims not to possess an individual nervous system,
while Elliot states: ‘Whatever goes into his bloodstream goes directly
into mine.’ Playing doctor in the most deadly way at the end of the
film, Beverly operates on Elliot with instruments supposedly designed
‘to separate Siamese twins.’ Resonating with repeated verbal references
to the original Siamese twins, the final shot has the moribund twins in
foetal position, joined like Chang and Eng at the chest.
As several critics have pointed out, however, the fusion and division
of the brothers in fact involves another fantasmatic figure, absent from
the film – the mother. Linda Badley notes that the film crew dubbed
their work ‘Foetal Attraction’ (1995: 132). Drawing attention to the
twins’ blood-red robes, the claustrophobic interiors bathed in filtered
amniotic-blue light, and the intra-uterine nature of both their do-
mestic environment and their professional activity, she argues that the
film is a ‘view from the womb’ (132). Drugged, the twins regress to an
increasingly infantile condition. The rare view of the outside world is
terrifying: Beverly’s failed attempt, at the end of the film, to exit
the narrow confines of the twins’ environment finds him in a tele-
phone booth planted in an overwhelmingly open space in front
of their building. Speechless and unable to escape to a life with Claire,
he returns to death in the twins’ apartment. As he has previously
commented, ‘separation can be a terrifying thing.’
From the womb, the omnipresent mother is not visible. Her role can
even be denied, as occurs both in the twins’ fantasised umbilical link
to each other and in their use of reproductive technology. As gynaeco-
logists, they specialise in female fertility, and their perspective is so
restricted to the womb that they do not ‘do husbands’ or childbirth.
Gender instability emphasises the possibility of the twins usurping

the mother’s position: the feminised names Bev and Elly prepare the
way for Beverly to use gynaecological instruments on his twin, thus
(lethally) superimposing a female anatomy on Elliot. As Badley writes:
‘Their professional and personal lives are devoted to the construction
of intricate systems that substitute for the mother, separate from her,
or both’ (1995: 133).
There is a wealth of critical work on the film, focusing on the rep-
resentation of twin separation as separation from the mother and its
attendant anxieties. Maggie Humm leans on Melanie Klein’s argument
that ‘the maternal controls the processes of separation and identity’
(1997: 77) to examine the film’s representation of male infant anxieties
and their role in the construction of masculine gender identity: ‘In
Dead Ringers the mothering body is […] the very source of male desire
and identity, the matrix through which male subjectivity is estab-
lished’ (60). Marcie Frank refers to the way in which ‘Cronenberg con-
strues [the twins’] separation paradigmatically as the separation of
mother and infant’ (1991: 460). Barbara Creed focuses on the film’s
depiction of male hysteria as a defence against symbolic castration,
‘that is, the castrations or separations which occur in the infant’s early
history and which the infant experiences as a loss of something which
it feels is an integral part of its own body – such as separation from the
womb or loss of the mother’s breast’ (1990: 129). What these analyses
have in common is a tendency to view the maternal dimension of
Dead Ringers as an idiosyncrasy of Cronenberg’s films.3 Considered
alongside The Fly, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome, Dead Ringers
does indicate something approaching an obsession with reproductive
processes. Yet, if we examine Dead Ringers together with other films
exploring the same topos, we find that Cronenberg’s representation is
not so idiosyncratic, and that the relation to the maternal body is a
recurring theme in films involving male conjoined twins. Significant
elements of Dead Ringers are anticipated by some less than auteur
cinema horror: Basket Case.
Basket Case (Henenlotter): keeping a lid on it
Duane Bradley carries his twin brother Belial around in a wicker basket
(Figure 4.1). Belial (a Biblical name for the personification of evil) is a
monstrously deformed ‘parasitic’ twin, a head and arms that was once
attached to Duane’s right side.4 In their adolescence, while their moth-
erly aunt was away, their father had them separated in a clandestine
Figure 4.1 Belial in Basket Case 1

Source: © 1981 Frank Henenlotter and Umbrella Entertainment All Rights Reserved
Courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment
attempt to give Duane a normal life he did not seek. With remarkable
resilience, Belial survived being put out with the garbage, and became a
homicidal mutant of superhuman strength. Basket Case (1981) starts
off as a story of revenge as Belial, aided by Duane, sets about killing
those who performed their separation. As the film progresses, however,
the focus shifts to Duane’s attempt to escape from the twin dyad by
means of his relationship with Sharon. What is interesting is that this
attempt is represented in terms of the separation of mother and infant.
Whereas Dead Ringers is marked by symmetry and similarity, Bev and
Elly both living in a foetal environment and usurping the maternal role
in their work, the obvious asymmetry of the twins in Basket Case calls
for a division of labour: Belial receives Duane’s maternal ministrations.
Belial’s existence is foetal (he prefers the dark, enclosed space of the
basket), as is his appearance, dominated by a frequently blood-smeared,
disproportionately large, squashed head. Moreover, he is infantilised
firstly by his aunt and then later by Duane. Duane turns out to be some-
thing of a maternal mixed bag. At times he is the stereotypical ‘bad
mother,’ feeding Belial a diet of junk food, losing him and his basket, and
leaving him with a non-functioning television as babysitter while he goes
on a date with Sharon. At other times, he is nurturing and rehearses
a familiar maternal discourse. Sensitive to the jealousy and fear of aban-

donment that has prompted Belial’s toddler-style destructive rampage
in the hotel room, Duane cuddles him on his lap and reassures him:
‘I’m not deserting you. I just needed some time to myself. I’d never desert
you after all we’ve been through. We’ll always be together.’
Although the maternal role is clearly assigned to Duane, the exist-
ence of both twins is marked by womb-like confinement, and here the
resonance with Dead Ringers is clear. The seedy Hotel Broslin (tracking
shots emphasising its long, narrow, tunnel-like passages and staircases)
is dark and claustrophobic, as are the bar where Duane recounts his life
story, the cinema where he loses Belial and the offices where the
murders are committed. The only exceptions to the otherwise enclosed
spaces of the film – Duane and Sharon’s sightseeing tour of New York
and a dream sequence in which Duane runs naked down the street to
Sharon’s apartment – both come to represent the possibility of Duane’s
independence from his twin. And just as Beverly, in the concluding
scenes of Dead Ringers, is unable to function in the open spaces outside
the uterine world of the twins’ shared lives, just as he is ultimately
unable to commit himself to a relationship with Claire, Duane too is
unable to fulfil the promise of these excursions into the open spaces
beyond the twin relation. Sharon poses precisely the same threat to
the twin relation as Claire does, offering the twins the possibility
of separating from each other but ultimately causing them to self-
destruct in the same way. When Duane finds Sharon killed by Belial,
he launches an enraged attack on his twin. They struggle, eventually
falling from the window to their presumed death, their bodies rejoined
as before at Duane’s abdomen, nicely anticipating the return to the
conjoined position of the bodies in the final scene of Dead Ringers.
Unlike the invisible but omnipresent maternity in Dead Ringers,
the mother role in Basket Case is aligned with Duane. His striving for
independence is portrayed as a separation not from the mother but
from the mother role in relation to his barely formed brother. In pursu-
ing Sharon, Duane seeks release from his confinement – in both the
spatial and obstetric senses of the word. His struggles are however in
vain: Duane is unable to be delivered of his foetal twin, who reattaches
himself to Duane’s abdomen. What the two films thus share is a preoc-
cupation with the twins’ conflictual desire for and fear of separation
and, in representing that conflict, both take the relation to the mater-
nal body as paradigmatic. In each case, through portraying the frater-
nal relation as umbilical, the topos of conjoined twins is used to allude
to the spectre of male maternity.
Basket Case II: coming up for air
With predictably miraculous hardiness, Duane and Belial survive their

fall to feature in an equally low-budget sequel, Basket Case II (1990),
that reinforces this representation as it recounts another story of failed
separation. For a while, independence seems attainable: Duane and
Belial are taken in by a community of ‘freaks’ living in the home
of Granny Ruth, a ‘freaks’ rights’ activist. Here, Belial finds not only a
new home outside his basket (the nursery), but a new mother (Granny
Ruth) and the possibility of a new and different life, paired up
with Eve, a shy, head-and-two-limbs creature as foetal as himself. The
diminished importance of the basket marks the attenuation of
the umbilical link between the brothers. Duane, relieved from his
fraternal/maternal responsibilities, can finally hit the road. And who
better to accompany him than the apparently normal Susan.
Susan however insists that although they are alike, neither she nor
Duane belong to the normal world outside. And at the film’s conclu-
sion she reveals her own freakishness, explaining, ‘I’m pregnant. I’ve
been so for the past six years.’ She lifts her shirt to reveal a long,
re-sealable opening in her abdomen from which a squalling amphibian
emerges. As the reptilian foetus returns inside her body, she blithely
informs Duane that he isn’t ready to be born yet but has to ‘come up
for air’ sometimes. If Duane reacts with horror, it is not only at the
revelation of Susan’s freakishness, but at the sudden realisation that
he and Susan are indeed alike in their abnormality, that their sameness
lies in their monstrous maternity. If her pregnancy involves the
repeated birthing of a monster child, a continuous, impossible process
of separation, Duane is reminded of his own maternal attachment
to his baby-like brother, who pops in and out of the security of the
basket. There is, of course, only one way to ‘make things right’: Duane
must (re-)enact his maternity, reincorporate his brother’s body into
his own, which he does by sewing the reluctant Belial back on to his
side. Jolted by the image of Susan’s permanent pregnancy, and of a
creature unable to leave the womb, Duane recognises his inability
to sever the umbilical link with his brother and reverses their illusory
separation. ‘It’s alright,’ he shouts wildly, ‘We’re back together again.’
The X-Files: staying out late
The representation of the conjoined twin as a foetus hesitating at birth

reaches its culmination in an episode of The X-Files entitled ‘Humbug’
(1995), in which no attempt made to conceal the dynamics (and trauma)

of maternal-infant separation. If, in both Dead Ringers and Basket Case,
the brother story is a cover for a mother story, then ‘Humbug’ blows that
cover. In clearly portraying Lenny and his conjoined twin brother
Leonard as mother and baby, ‘Humbug’ is marked by a degree of parodic
self-reflexivity and explicitness in its representations of the fraternal as
maternal that is not present in the other examples.
In this episode, Scully and Mulder find themselves in Gibsonton,
investigating a series of murders in which the fatal ‘entry wound’ is a
deep, gaping puncture in the victim’s abdomen like a slit between
two puckered lips. Gibsonton, the traditional off-season home for
sideshow performers, is a carnivalesque community, home to such
human curiosities as The Alligator Man, contortionist Dr Blockhead
and his omnivorous side-kick The Conundrum. It is at the funeral of
the murdered Alligator Man that Scully and Mulder first encounter
Lenny and Leonard. Lenny has what appears to be an infant, cutely
dressed in a tiny suit, clasped against his breast, nuzzling into him
(Figure 4.2). But this is no new-born: rather Lenny turns out to be
mothering his parasitic conjoined twin brother, Leonard. A further
encounter reinforces the feminised image of Lenny when he knocks at
Scully’s door early one morning in his dressing-gown. His body is soft,
and the bulge of his brother’s body protrudes from his gown. Scully
cannot help staring, while Lenny’s eyes are drawn to the cleavage
revealed by Scully’s gaping robe. Conscious of the other’s gaze, each
hurries to cover the exposed flesh. The two bodies – the monstrous and
the feminine – are clearly parallel in the way in which they attract the
gaze.5
As to the identity of the killer, tracks suggest that the killer has a tail
of sorts, and can squeeze through a dog-flap. The mysterious clue
linking all the murders is a trace of blood, curiously always at the
opening through which the killer enters rather than exits the scene of
the crime. The explanation is revealed when alcoholic Lenny is locked
up to dry out. We see him all alone in his cell: where Leonard is
usually perched, we find a wound, and there is blood around the
window bars. The Sheriff is horrified: ‘They extracted the twin!’ Scully,
however, knows better: ‘No, the twin extracted itself. […] This wound
is identical to the other victims’ wounds, with one exception – he’s not
bleeding.’ Indeed the wound has no discernible effect on Lenny’s
health. Neither is Leonard a victim: rather the blood on the bars points
to the escape route of this half-formed creature. Once more, the con-
joined twin is revealed to be a homicidal mutant. Scully’s diagnosis?
Figure 4.2 Conjoined twins Lenny (Vincent Schiavelli) and Leonard in the
‘Humbug’ episode of The X-Files
Source: © 1994 Twentieth Century Fox Television All Rights Reserved
‘I have a feeling that Lenny has an internal anomaly that allows his
conjoining twin to disjoin.’ Sure enough, when Lenny dies soon after,
Scully’s hypothesis is confirmed: the autopsy reveals ‘offshoots of the
oesophagus and trachea that almost seem umbilical in nature.’
Unlike Belial in Basket Case, Leonard is not simply attached to his
twin by tissue that can be severed to effect separation. The relation is
more like Susan’s ongoing pregnancy – the little monster who has
to ‘come up for air sometimes’ – with the difference that Leonard is
distinctly detachable, able to ‘crawl outside [Lenny’s] body and then go
gallivanting around town.’ In fact, Leonard occupies a space reminis-
cent of Belial’s basket – a kind of marsupial pouch on his brother’s left
side, below the ribs, with a long, vagina-like opening. Like Duane in
Basket Case, Lenny is very clearly maternal in his relationship with
Leonard. But when the basket is replaced by a pouch, this adds a very
distinct and bodily feminisation. The sign of his twin’s detachability is
not a scar but an orifice. Furthermore, Leonard’s umbilical ‘tail’ (hence
the unidentified tracks) and blood-smeared body (hence the mysterious
blood traces) suggest that he is part-foetus and that, despite repeated
birthing, he is far from ready to leave the gestational pouch defin-
itively. In fact, his murders are attempts to burrow into imagined
pouches in other bodies. As Lenny explains soulfully, ‘I don’t think he
knows he’s harming anyone. He’s merely seeking another brother.’
Fearing that his inadequacy as a brother/mother is what drives Leonard
away, and yet over-protective and possessive, Lenny echoes a classic
maternal discourse of reproach and self-reproach, and insists that
Leonard always comes back. This time, however, he does not return.
We glimpse him escaping from the jail, umbilical cord trailing, and
taking refuge in the narrow passages of a hall of mirrors before ventur-
ing outside to be devoured by The Conundrum. His fatal/foetal desire
to re-enter a brother’s belly is fulfilled.
Horror and the male body
The texts of our corpus have so far all been associated to some extent
with the horror genre, but the trademark irony of The X-Files allows us to
view ‘Humbug’ as a commentary on the conventions of the genre.
Firstly, there is the very use of conjoined twins: the predictability that
they should be the central figures and that one should be the murderer.6
And secondly, in portraying their fraternal relation so clearly as a mater-
nal relation, the ‘Humbug’ episode self-consciously engages with a
usually implicit – even covert – aspect of their representation in late
twentieth-century horror. This foregrounding of conventions allows us
to raise explicit questions about genre and topos. Why do conjoined
twin brothers feature so prominently in 1980s and 1990s horror? What
makes them such suitable material for a maternal makeover at this time?
Finally, what would it take to shift this pattern and make a film of joined
brothers that takes the story away from horror?
The horror film is loosely defined by the centrality of a monstrous

character (Russell, 1998: 252), and conjoined twins are readily per-
ceived as candidates for this role. Indeed historical studies suggest that
a large proportion of so-called monsters – notably the two-headed and
multi-limbed varieties – were in fact conjoined twins. Thompson’s
survey The Mystery and Lore of Monsters (first published 1930) gives
examples of such monstrous births from the Roman and early Chris-
tian periods, followed by a multitude of representations of so-called
double-headed monsters and creatures with extra limbs or a head at
their abdomen from the illustrated volumes of Conrad Lycosthenes,
Fenton, Ambroise Paré, Pierre Boiastuau and Fortunio Licetus in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Thompson, 1968: 30–62).
Wonders of the eighteenth century to which crowds flocked included
‘a monster with one head and two distinct bodies, with four arms,
hands and legs’ (66), and it was only during that century that Caspar
Friedrich Wolff suggested the principles of embryology to explain the
existence of such creatures (Thompson, 1930: 70).
The overrepresentation of conjoined twins in accounts of monsters
was mirrored in their omnipresence in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century carnival freak shows, which allowed the public to experience
that mixture of fear, disgust and attraction occasioned by the presence
of the monstrous. Fiedler identifies the horror film as heir to the now
defunct freak show, in that it provides a similar opportunity to gaze
upon the monstrous with impunity (1981: 315). Horror films are now
the only place where ‘freaks’ can still be shown.7
Most recent studies of monstrosity define the monstrous and explain
its cultural importance in terms of a violation of boundaries (Fiedler,
1981; Kristeva, 1982; Halberstam, 1995; Cohen, 1996). Monsters repres-
ent an unholy hybridity, a ‘category crisis’ (Garber, 1992: 16). Certainly,
conjoined twins fit this definition: they disturb the borders between self
and other, one and two, whole and part, autonomy and dependence.
And yet, in our corpus, their representation confounds another, unex-
pected borderline involving gender: brother/mother. While the notion
of boundary challenging explains the link between conjoined twins
and horror, it falls short of accounting for the representation of the
conjoined twin relationship as maternal.
Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (first published 1980) is valuable here,
for it links the violation of boundaries with the relation to the mater-
nal body in early psychosexual development. Kristeva explains that
‘abjection’ – our reaction of horror – stems from a breakdown of the
distinction between self and other. Thus we react with disgust at what
transgresses the borders of the clean-and-proper body (vomit, pus,

excrement), at what disturbs the boundary between inside and outside,
between me and not-me (corpses, decay). She argues that these distinc-
tions (self/other, inside/outside, proper/abhorrent) in fact elaborate a
more archaic division that must be made between one’s own body and
the mother’s in order to establish oneself as a separate entity. Thus
Kristeva posits that horror in the most general sense harks back to the
ambiguities of separation from the maternal body.
Now, the disturbance of bodily limits is a given with conjoined
twins. And splitting them means separating two beings together since
the womb, like the infant/mother dyad. The topos thus lends itself to
the theme of establishing identity through difference, viewed by psy-
choanalysts such as Kristeva as inevitably based on the separation from
the mother as other and giving rise to separation anxiety.8 And yet the
repeated use of conjoined twins in horror films to invoke an abject
maternity is not simply the result of a developmental parallel between
twin individuation and mother/infant separation, for it is only male
conjoined twins that impose exploration of the maternal, while virtu-
ally all female filmic twins succumb to the virgin/whore dichotomy:
there are no nurturing twin sisters.9 Clearly it is the relation between
the male body and the maternal function that arouses horror in the
1980s and 1990s.
It is useful to consider Badley’s and Halberstam’s accounts of the
evolution of the horror genre at this point, for while they do not coin-
cide, they both point to a focus on gender ambiguity in late twentieth-
century horror films. In line with rising public anxiety about the ‘crisis
in masculinity,’ they see gender confusion as having the capacity to
terrify during this period.
Halberstam describes a shift from the violation of racial, species, class
and nationality boundaries in nineteenth-century gothic monsters
towards a crisis of gender and sexual identity in contemporary horror.
She puts this largely down to the triumph of psychoanalytical inter-
pretations of ‘subjectivity as sexual subjectivity and identity as sexual
identity and monstrosity as sexual pathology’ (1995: 24).
Badley, on the other hand, explains the shift she identifies in terms
of the waning of Freudian psychoanalysis, yet still arrives at gender dis-
turbance as a central concern in contemporary horror. She suggests
that early horror is traditionally explained in psychosexual terms, with
the emphasis placed on its supernatural aspects – the unconscious, psy-
chological terror, the uncanny. On the other hand, post-1980 horror,
she argues, can be seen in terms of a discourse of the body: the body is
opened up and transformed, displayed in all its monstrosity (1995:

5–31). It is worth noting that the topos of conjoined twins lends itself
to both these understandings of horror, offering both the uncanniness
of the fabled telepathic relation between twins and the possibility
of the gruesome division of their bodies. Badley’s characterisation of
recent horror, however, sheds even greater light on the filmic repres-
entation of conjoined twins when she suggests that male maternity
actually typifies post-1980 horror. The late 1970s, she argues, saw a dis-
cursive shift from the Freudian psychoanalytical model of the self to an
understanding of the self as embodied, and the 1980s horror boom
articulated the accompanying crisis of identity through an icono-
graphy of the monstrous. The focus on the supernatural was replaced
by a graphic physicality and especially by grotesque bodily transforma-
tions, frequently producing gender ambiguity (Badley, 1995: 26). Most
notably, horror films started to feminise the bodies of their male prot-
agonists, to expose them as ‘hysterical’ (105–6). This metamorphosis is
figured in depictions of the hypermasculinised ‘hard body’ as per-
meable, as a focus of invasion. In particular, it is transformed into a
maternal body ‘through which the male subject confronted or “gave
birth to” the soft bodied “feminine” in himself’ (106). Badley suggests
that it is this association between the male body and the maternal
function – the monstrousness of male maternity – that is at the heart
of the 1980s transformation films (126). If traditional masculine iden-
tities were in a state of flux at this time, men’s bodies were mutating
in parallel on screen.
There is, then, critical work linking recent horror and its representa-
tion of the monstrous body with the violation of gender boundaries
and explaining the phenomenon in terms of contemporary cultural
anxieties. Badley goes so far as to identify male maternity as symp-
tomatic of recent horror. The coherence of our film corpus, however,
indicates a pattern that is at once more specific than the characterisa-
tion of an entire genre and yet wider than the kind of personal obses-
sion attributed to David Cronenberg. Male maternity may be distinctive
of 1980s horror, but conjoined twins – invariably joined via the belly
and facing the anguish of separation – provide a particularly clear
opportunity for exploiting it.
The pattern we have identified is thus the product of a particular
conjunction of topos (conjoined twins), gender (male), genre (body
horror) and era (post-1980), and through repetition it acquires a
certain discursive power during the 1980s and 1990s. So much so that
the theme of maternity becomes difficult to avoid when portraying
conjoined twin brothers in film, even when the twins appear in genres
other than horror. The Dark Half is a limit case in which the most
tenuous bodily attachment between brothers still invokes the mater-
nal, while Twin Falls Idaho attempts to take the story in a different
direction and to rearticulate the twin relation.
The Dark Half (Romero): in denial
The Dark Half (1993) sits precisely at a point of tension between

thrillers and horror, between narratives of good and evil brothers and
stories of conjoined twins, between the macho and the maternal.
Thad Beaumont and his alter ego George Stark are only physically
connected in the most minimal sense, and yet this vestige of corpor-
eal connection together with the proximity to the horror genre seem
to make it impossible to avoid representations of their relation in
terms of maternal attachment.
The film is not obviously about conjoined twins. As a child, Thad
Beaumont suffered from severe headaches accompanied by auditory
hallucinations. The cause was eventually discovered and a ‘very rare
sort of tumour’ was surgically removed from his brain. Consisting of
‘en eye, part of a nostril, [and] two teeth,’ the ‘tumour’ turned out to
be the vestiges of an unborn twin, ‘absorbed into the system,’ that
somehow ‘got itself going again’ and started to grow.10 Now married
with small twin sons, Thad is a college English professor who writes
best-selling, violent, sleazy novels under the pseudonym of George
Stark. In order to frustrate a blackmail attempt, Thad decides to reveal
the true identity of George Stark and retire the pseudonym. Faced with
the prospect of his own ‘death,’ Stark comes to life with a vengeance,
colonising the foetal remains and becoming Thad’s homicidal double.
Nor is The Dark Half obviously a film about maternity. Despite his
beginnings as a foetal twin, Stark is certainly not infantilised. On the
contrary, the character is hypermasculinised: drinking, smoking,
violent, foul-mouthed and sadistic, he relishes in his gratuitously
violent murders. In this case, the ‘beast inside’ – Thad’s ‘dark half’ – is
certainly not a baby. Although physically identical right down to their
fingerprints, Thad and George are poles apart: while Thad is conspicu-
ously depicted sharing childcare responsibilities, George is a thorough-
going tough guy. The ready availability of this contrast between the
caring, respectable, unassuming Thad and the vulgar, violent George
Stark suggests that this film sits comfortably with male twin films in
other genres. Moreover, the relationship between Thad and George has
none of those nurturing aspects that were so apparent in Basket Case I

and The X-Files. Yet even in this film the appearance of male conjoined
twins imposes consideration of the maternal. For even in The Dark
Half ’s determinedly masculine, hard-bodied world, Thad’s means of
escaping from George Stark involves a repeated (and somewhat uncon-
vincing) denial of his own maternity.
From the very beginning, the scenario of Thad’s ‘tumour’ is a very
clear example of a feminisation – indeed, literally, a hystericisation –
of the male body: Thad’s body harbours a growing foetus. The organ
that nurtures the foetal twin is not however the womb we might
expect. Unlike the brother emerging from the pouch in The X-Files,
or from below the rib cage in Basket Case, or from the belly in Dead
Ringers, the vestige of Thad’s twin is lodged in the brain. The site
of gestation has shifted upwards. As Vern Bullough (1973) notes,
hysteria was once thought to be due to a disturbed uterus wander-
ing through the body. In these terms, the vertical migration of the
unabsorbed foetal twin to Thad’s brain – his wandering would-be
womb – is a form of male hysteria.
It is significant that the foetus is a cerebral one. Thad does not share
the same sort of obvious bodily connection with Stark that is apparent
in the other films of our corpus. Indeed he is at pains to deny such a
bond. Thad comes to understand his alter ego twin as an intellectual
invention – ‘a conjuration, an entity created by the force of [his] will,’
and the mode of their connection is primarily psychical, mediated
through writing as Stark’s thoughts are channelled through Thad’s
hand.
The denial of a visceral bond is however undermined through the
competing metaphors of creativity that pervade the film. On the one
hand, Thad, when writing as George, uses long, black pencils, phallic
weapons viciously sharpened to the point where they can and do
maim. At the same time, Thad himself describes his writing as a kind
of birth: ‘It’s not coming out of me easy,’ he comments. More signific-
antly, George Stark’s creation is re-interpreted to Thad through gesta-
tion and birth metaphors. When Thad visits the doctor who removed
his ‘tumour,’ he is told that his parents had insisted on its burial in the
family graveyard plot. The tissue has the status of human remains, like
a miscarried foetus or a stillborn baby. The morning after the first
murder, the local gravedigger finds a hole in the grave site with hand
prints around the edge ‘as if someone buried alive dug his way out.’
The second twin has pushed his way into the world. Later, the local
police investigator confronts Thad with the preposterousness of his
assertions that the murders were committed by his pseudonym:

‘Maybe you’d like to tell me where this guy came from, Thad. Did you
just sort of give birth to him one night? Did he pop out of a damn
sparrow’s egg? Exactly how did it go?’ George Stark is characterised as
Thad’s offspring, borne of his body as much as of his pencil.
In The Dark Half, then, there are not the obvious indices of maternity
that are present in the rest of our corpus (the professional and personal
obsession with reproductive processes, the distinctly foetal mutant
twin, the quasi-marsupial pouch). Nonetheless, the traces of con-
joinedness in horror mean that that we once again find an insistent
maternal dimension to the representation of the relation between the
brothers.11
Twin Falls Idaho (Polish brothers): deflecting the maternal
The Polish brothers’ 1999 film Twin Falls Idaho presents itself in terms
of its difference. The tagline to the film’s title is ‘a different kind of love
story,’ and the review quoted on the poster reiterates the claim: ‘How-
ever many films you may have seen, you probably haven’t seen any-
thing like Twin Falls Idaho.’12 Certainly the film is not your standard
romance, and as a love story, we might expect a sharp contrast with
the horror films studied. Separation from this corpus, however, seems
to involve revisiting many of its tropes.
From the earliest sequences we see the narrow hotel corridor and
the dingy exiguity of the hotel room. One face and then the other
peeps through the bathroom door. Blake and Francis Falls, conjoined
laterally at the thorax, do not venture outside except at Halloween,
and their indoor existence is emphasised through the use of sepia
tones, and green and blue lighting. Only once do they find themselves
in the brightly exposed open space of a city park, and the experience
is distressing. The film recounts the triangulation of the twinship:
Penny enters their life, and while Blake falls for her and imagines a
life away from his brother, Francis grows jealous and contemplates his
abandonment. Meanwhile, their quest to find their lost mother, along
with half-articulated allusions to an abandoned child and a joking ref-
erence to the abject maternal make motherhood an underlying issue
throughout the film.
Clearly the film rehearses some of the conventions we have identi-
fied for the depiction of conjoined twin brothers: the dark confined
spaces, the stark contrast between inside and outside, the monstrous
body as object of a voyeuristic gaze, the woman who comes between
the twins, the maternal dimension. It does not, however, simply reiter-
ate them. There is an important difference in the portrayal of the twin
relation between this and the other films in our corpus: the fraternal
relation is never represented as maternal or as substituting for
the mother. In Twin Falls Idaho, the undercurrent of allusions to moth-
erhood is clearly associated with mothers, not brothers, while the
brothers’ relationship is repeatedly characterised as marital.
This does not however mean that the film is simply able to ignore the
representational conventions established for the topos. On the contrary,
it is continually obliged to deal with them. This is obvious firstly in the
generic positioning of the film. Twin Falls Idaho is described as a drama
and a love story, but this does not simply eliminate the horror genre:
rather the film positions itself as patently not horror. Anne Freadman
(1988) emphasises the importance of ‘not-statements’ in her theorisation
of genre, demonstrating that cultural practices define their genre by
explicitly distancing themselves from neighbouring genres. The regular
use of conjoined twins to represent horror means that Twin Falls Idaho
must continually reassert its status as other than horror, which it does
by repeated references to and deflection of the genre.13
Thus the camera lingers voyeuristically on the joined chests as
Penny’s doctor friend examines them, but Miles is patently not wield-
ing a scalpel (‘Relax, I’m not a surgeon,’ he says) and is far from keen
to see them separated. Even the emergency surgery late in the film to
separate the twins eschews the gruesome in favour of a poetic dream-
like sequence. Misshapen bodies are highlighted in the film, but are far
from confined to the twins: from the taxi-driver’s steel claw hand from
which Penny recoils in the opening sequence to the ex-circus dwarf
who leads Penny to Blake’s van at the end, unconventional bodies
abound. At a Halloween party, the twins stand out only for the excel-
lence of their ‘costume’ among the carnivalesque party-goers, who
include a half-man-half-woman and ‘Siamese’ twins in red Chinese
outfits tied together with ribbons. Split screens are used to show the
variety of disguises.14 The gay host, on learning of the twins’ conjoined
condition, exclaims ‘the horror!’ imagining that one twin might be gay
and the other straight, and insists that he is a freak too. As a culturally
sanctioned freak show, the party works as a commentary on the con-
ventions of horror, in contrast to the principal narrative. Finally, the
story that might have been the basis for horror – the story of gestation
in a cow’s belly – is clearly a joke.
The second, related way in which the film needs to displace conven-
tions is in the representation of the twin relation. Although Blake takes
care of his sick brother, this nurturing is not figured as maternal. On

the contrary, there are explicit references to the twinship as a marriage.
After examining the brothers early in the film, Miles takes Penny aside:
‘You see two people depend on each other for survival – makes you feel
kinda queasy, huh? Quite a marriage.’ And as Blake says goodbye to
Penny, he adds with the trace of a wry smile: ‘Maybe I’ll call you –
when I’m single.’ Later the exploitative Jay wants to offer them tab-
loid fame by inventing ‘the most famous divorce case of all time.’ And
their charismatic neighbour Jesus, marriage celebrant cum revivalist
preacher, sees their relation as the ultimate wedlock: ‘I like what you
two represent: two folks living in harmony. […] You two symbolise
peace and love, like you’re the biological realisation of togetherness.
[…] Divorce is not even an option in your marriage.’
The conspicuous repetition of the conjugal analogy serves to dis-
tance this portrayal of conjoined brothers from the others we have
studied. The analogy is reinforced when Blake and Francis do a maga-
zine romance quiz interpreting give and take in relationships, and
during the bitter fight when Francis accuses Blake of falling in love,
and Blake accuses Francis of jealousy. Furthermore, the twin relation
is portrayed as a partnership of equals. It resembles their musical
duo, Blake and Francis each using one hand to play a guitar. As Miles
remarks when surgery seems imminent: ‘Two single dollars put
together into one bill, worth twice its value – tear it in half and you
don’t get two single bills. The bill loses all its value. The strength is in
the bond of two. They need each other to live as one.’ The parental
does not enter the equation.
Similarly, the possibility of their separation is never seen in terms of
birth/emergence, unlike infantilised Beverly propelled outside, Belial
peeping from his basket, Leonard protuding from the pouch, and Stark
emerging from the hole in the ground in the other films of our corpus.
Instead, it is seen as a divorce, and the metaphor is one of bisection.
Blake reminisces about their youthful desire to separate:
Every dollar was fifty cents. When we were little, we used to search
for train tracks, every city we’d visit, and when we found ‘em, we’d
lie down, a rail would split between us, and we’d wait for a train.
Francis used to say, ‘Blake, do you hear the train?’
When the operation to separate them finally takes place, we see a hal-
lucinatory fantasy. A grainy film, fading to white, shows Blake and
Francis unattached, cycling on a cliff edge in circles and figures of eight
on separate old-fashioned bikes. Having traced these symbols of their

relation and separation, Francis cycles away, waves goodbye across a
gulf between two cliffs and disappears. Francis has gone over to the
other side, and Blake remains. This is parting, not parturition.
Lastly, the use of confined spaces is not linked to a uterine metaphor.
There is nothing foetal about the claustrophobic scenes in the hotel.
Rather, together with the bars that frame the twins’ faces at the peephole
in the hotel door, the grill fence of the city park through which
passersby gawk at them, and various verbal references, they allude to the
caging of freaks.
Twin Falls Idaho thus sets itself apart from the other films in our
corpus by positioning itself against the horror genre and avoiding any
hint of the maternal in its representations of the twin relation.
Curiously, however, there is still a focus on maternity in the film. It is
as though merely abstaining from representing male maternity is not
enough to dispel a now compelling convention. Maternity must be
seen to be firmly re-anchored to the feminine.
Early in the film we learn that there is something to discover about
Penny. Miles’ remark is unfinished: ‘If you ever want to find out how he’s
doing, or some information…’ and his words echo later to Penny in front
of the mirror. Who is ‘he’? And for what does Penny need to make
amends (‘I need something to level my karma’) by tending to Blake and
Francis? Penny’s secret haunts the film. Her lawyer/pimp Jay sheds some
light, when he too takes Penny’s solicitude for atonement: ‘Just because
you had a retard … ok, you couldn’t take care of it, you did the right
thing, you got rid of him, but you can’t replace him with those freaks in
there.’ Penny’s secret is a son that she tries to forget she had. Although
Penny’s capacity for childcare is somewhat doubtful (she is at a loss when
asked to buy food for the twins), her caring gestures towards the brothers
are interpreted by both herself and Jay as substituting for a maternal rela-
tionship with her disabled son. If motherhood is a theme of the film, in
Twin Falls Idaho it is deflected back where it belongs – on to the mother.
This is not the only instance of feminine refusal of and confronta-
tion with the maternal role. The brothers know that Francis’ health is
failing, and they are in town with the express purpose of finding
the mother who abandoned them, known to them only through a
name on their adoption certificate: Francine Ross. At Halloween, the
only night they can roam freely, they go trick-or-treating and call on
Francine, who registers shock but recovers momentarily:
FRANCINE—You two boys have made a really great costume. It kind of

frightened me. I thought you two were real.
FRANCIS—You look real too.

FRANCINE—Real?
BLAKE—… like … our mother.
The dish of sweets crashes to the floor, and Francine gasps ‘I’m sorry,
I’m sorry’ as she slams the door.
Even before this encounter, however, Francine’s experience is a
subject of speculation. Penny’s friend muses: ‘Could you imagine being
their mother?’, and the failed reunion is followed by a scene where a
story – clearly endlessly rehearsed to comic effect – is told to explain
(or to avoid explaining) the absence of a mother. Penny’s enquiry (‘Did
your mother have to put up with shit like that when you were kids?’) is
met with ‘We didn’t have a mother.’ When Penny insists, Blake con-
tinues with ‘We don’t have a human mother’ and the brothers jointly
tell of being transferred to a cow for the last one and a half months of
pregnancy, the punchline being a moo-like ‘Maaaa’ from Francis.
The unanswered questions about Penny’s child and Francine’s desire
to avoid the inevitable confrontation with her sons become important
linked issues in the film. It is Penny who begs Francine to visit the
twins in hospital as Francis lies dying. Both women are in tears as
Francine describes her decision to give up the twins and the anguish
that has never left her, and we understand Francine’s story as a com-
mentary on Penny’s. And just as Penny avoids receiving information
about her son, Francine feels she cannot go to the hospital. Eventually,
however, she yields, and Francis is reunited with his mother before he
dies.
If Francine is finally able to accept her maternal role after denying it
for so long, we wonder whether Penny will not do likewise, but the
question remains open, and the film concludes with the possibility
that Blake’s grieving might eventually give way to romance with
Penny. Motherhood is thus a crucial theme in the film, but remains
firmly linked to mothers.
Shifting the pattern
If twin sister films invariably work through fantasies of unbridled female

sexuality and virginal virtue, late twentieth-century filmic narratives of
conjoined twin brothers also impose a compulsory figure: a mother story
of sorts. In these films associated with the horror genre, the fraternal rela-
tion inevitably substitutes for the maternal. David Cronenberg’s twin
gynaecologists may have attracted the most critical attention in this
regard, but they are far from alone in their fraternal/maternal attachment.
With bodily limits already blurred by an archaic joining going back to the
womb, the topos of male conjoined twins provides an ideal opportunity
to hystericise the male body, to linger on its instability and permeability,
to depict it as maternal. Employed in this way, it speaks to the preoccupa-
tion with gender ambiguity said to be characteristic of post-1980 horror
and reflecting a crisis in masculine identity.
However, the striking coherence of our horror corpus – the insistence
and predictability with which the foetal brother appears – is only par-
tially accounted for by such broad characterisations of horror genres.
Atypical of filmic representations of twins generally, and not paralleled
in horror films of conjoined twin sisters, the representation of brother
as mother is a product of a particular conjunction of topos, gender and
genre. Its force at the close of the century is such that the theme of
maternity still needs to be addressed when a film featuring conjoined
twin brothers attempts to shift the genre away from horror. Thus the
self-styled love story Twin Falls Idaho, unable to simply escape or
ignore this convention, must continually deflect it. Its protagonists are
obliged to negotiate not only their own fraternity, but also the fact
that they form part of a broader filmic fraternity of conjoined twins,
occupying a privileged site for exploring the separation of self and
(m)other.
5
Twins and the ‘Gay Gene’ Debate:
When Queer Comic Fiction Meets
Behaviour Genetics
A queer twist on twin tales
The reunited twins story is a venerable chestnut in journalism, one

of those rare and quirky good-news items that is guaranteed to gain
international exposure, along with stories of pets that have tramped
across the country to find their masters. (Wright, 1997: 33)
Reunited twins may be a news story, but they are hardly a new story.
The minutiae of lives – habits found to be shared, extraordinary paral-
lels or contrasts in experiences – may differ from case to case, but
the tale is predictable enough to be parodied, an opportunity taken up
by Robert Rodi in Drag Queen (1995). Queer rather than quirky, con-
spicuously comic, the novel puts a gay spin on the long lost twin tale,
putting its characters in a spin in the process.
Twins separated at birth – what might be gained from a gay retell-
ing? To answer, we need to read intertextually, juxtaposing this tale
with others. As Wright points out in the quotation above, reunited
twin stories are common in journalism. They also feature in plays,
novels and films, and these represent the more obvious comic ante-
cedents to Rodi’s novel.1 There is, however, another entire field and
method of research devoted to versions of this story: twin studies.
Although the genre of writing associated with it – the research paper in
behaviour genetics – is only partly narrative, it will prove a useful foil
against which to read Drag Queen.
Twins confront us with questions of identity, and perhaps none
more confronting than sexual identity. Sexual identity is the focus
both of many twin studies and of Rodi’s parody, and it is both product-
ive and revealing to read Drag Queen as a tacit engagement with such
89
studies, for the novel unsettles the premises of much of the research.
Studies comparing rates of homosexuality among different types of
twins seek to determine whether sexual orientation is social or biolo-
gical in origin and feed into debates about the naturalness or otherwise
of same-sex relations. They tend to rely, however, on some overly neat
distinctions – between heterosexual and homosexual, between same
and different – that the novel puts into question.
The chapter starts with improbable tales of identical twins of mixed
gender, which appear in both fiction and research. It then studies the
way in which twins have been mobilised in research work to support
the very structure that they seem to defy: the binary opposition that
divides same and different, self and other. The chapter points to the
uncertainty of the binaries underpinning twin studies before scrutin-
ising the categories of sexual identity made available in the research
papers, and unmade in Rodi’s novel. In doing so, it underscores the
tensions between the various understandings of identity and the self
that vie for acceptance in contemporary culture.
Identical, except …
Monozygotic (literally single egg) twins are usually referred to in

English as identical, and come into being when an embryo splits into
two, in effect cloning itself. This would appear to rule out the possibil-
ity of mixed gender identical twins. In the cultural imagination,
however, such pairs are not hard to find. They may stretch the limits
of vraisemblance, but are readily available for comedy, whether in
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or some four centuries later in Mabel
Maney’s Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy: An Original Jane Bond Parody.
I remember being constantly asked if my baby son and daughter
were identical twins. When I repeated that they were of mixed sex and
invited the asker to ponder the implications, the response was often:
‘yes, of course, but apart from that?’2 It was as if sex/gender were a kind
of add-on or overlay to an underlying physiology and psychology,
such that twins could be identical in every way except sex. Boy/girl
identical twins are easily conceived in the public imagination, if not in
utero, and provide an opportunity to pursue the fantasy of imagining
oneself as a member of the opposite sex.3
There is, of course, a notorious case of such twins in the social
research literature: the ‘John/Joan’ case made famous by John Money
(1972) and exposed by researcher Milton Diamond (1997) and later by
journalist John Colapinto in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was
Twins and the ‘Gay Gene’ Debate 91
Raised as a Girl (2000). In 1963 one of a pair of identical twin baby

boys had his penis burnt off in a botched circumcision and was subse-
quently castrated and raised as a girl on Money’s advice. The gruesome
accident provided an opportunity for Money to test his theory that
children were born psychosexually neutral, that gender identity was
learnt rather than innate and indeed remained malleable during the
first eighteen months of life. The fact that the accident had befallen a
twin was a useful coincidence in research design, for the identical
twin brother could serve as the control subject. For many years, reports
indicated the supposed success of this experiment: the castrated twin
was said to delight in feminine pastimes and appearance. Its disastrous
consequences for the entire family eventually came to light, however,
along with the fact that in the meantime ‘Joan’ had undergone a
double mastectomy and phalloplasty in order to become David, male
once again.
This is but a recent chapter in the shady history of twins research. For
although undeniably beneficial in the isolation of genetic factors con-
tributing to certain diseases, twins research has its sinister side, having, as
Wright notes, ‘been born in Galton’s aristocratic notions of the natural
worthiness of the English upper class, taken to its evil extreme by Nazi
eugenicists, and too readily used by American scientists to rationalise
racial injustice’ (1997: 30; cf. Schwartz, 1996: 30–6).
Like so much twins research, both the John/Joan experiment and the
exposure of its failure have been used to weigh into the nature/nurture
debate, here in relation to gender identity and gendered behaviour.
Each has come down clearly on one side or the other: where Money
claimed ‘nurture,’ Colapinto retorts ‘nature.’ It is ironic that identical
twins – who confound the opposition between same and other, the
binary at the basis of all oppositions – should so frequently be har-
nessed to uphold dichotomies. A number of supposedly clear binaries
are in play in this case: male/female, masculine/feminine, nature/
nurture. And the experiment as a whole depends on yet another op-
position: twin studies methodology is founded on a neat, watertight
distinction between identical and non-identical twins. Results are even
formulated in terms of percentages for concordance and discordance,
that is, sameness and difference. The disturbance of the opposition
same/different by the very existence of identical twins is occulted:
sameness and difference become calculable percentages.
John/Joan is not the only case of genetically identical (monozygotic)
mixed gender twins in the scientific literature. In fact, although seem-
ingly impossible, at least three instances have been recorded. Wright
explains that in each case one twin was an XY male while the other
had an X but no Y chromosome, creating an intersex condition known
as Turner’s Syndrome whereby an apparent female presents ambiguous
sexual development (1997: 99; cf. Bryan, 1992: 65). Such cases (and the
rise in intersex activism) remind us that male/female is not a simple
binary (cf. Fausto-Sterling, 1993; Kessler, 1998). At the same time, they
question an even more fundamental opposition in twins research: that
between identical and non-identical twins.
Despite its dualistic title, Lawrence Wright’s book Twins: Genes,
Environment and the Mystery of Identity works to deconstruct this
and other binaries underpinning much twins research, notably the
nature/nurture dichotomy. He contends that identical/non-identical
is a misleading nomenclature by which to distinguish types of twins
(1997: 95), in that resemblance among both monozygotic (MZ)
and dizygotic (DZ) twins occurs along a continuum. 4 ‘Clearly some
identical twins are more identical than others’ (96), he affirms:
‘[f]raternal twins can be so similar that they believe they must be
monozygotic, while identicals can be dramatically discordant for
facial features, such as cleft lip or palate’ (96). MZ twins may be born
from entirely separate placentas, while in rare cases the placentas
of DZ twins merge (90). Wright indicates the wide range of ways
in which monozygotic twins may differ from each other, being
‘genetically identical but biologically different’ (98). Sources of dif-
ference for MZ twins include: the timing of the twinning process,
twin transfusion syndrome, unequal prenatal nutrition, the attach-
ment of the placenta(s), chromosomal changes, and distribution
patterns of the X chromosome in MZ twin girls (Wright, 1997: 91–9;
cf. Farber, 1981: 9).
Wright, however, goes further, putting a question mark over the
whole monozygotic/dizygotic opposition. As he notes, ‘the most fun-
damental proposition of twin science is that fraternal and identical
twinning are entirely separate processes’ (1997: 84). He reports,
however, that the one egg/two egg categorisation is called into ques-
tion by geneticist Charles Boklage, who wonders whether the two
forms of twinning have something in common, for there is evidence
that both kinds of twins are more like each other than like singletons.
Boklage suggests ‘a third type of twinning, in which fraternal twins
derive from a single egg, one that splits before conception, so that the
same egg is fertilised twice’ (Wright, 1997: 85).5 Such a process ‘would
confound comparisons between identicals and fraternals, undermining
the whole structure of behaviour genetics’ (85–6).
The deconstruction of the oppositions underpinning twin studies

does not stop there. Early pregnancy scans (transvaginal ultrasounds at
five weeks) increasingly reveal multiple pregnancies that show up
several weeks later as single gestations. The so-called ‘vanishing twin’
syndrome (of which Schwartz traces the mythology, 1996: 19–21) is
now believed to be extremely common, with a conservative estimate of
15 per cent of the population consisting of apparent singletons who
are in fact survivors of a twin pregnancy (Wright, 1997: 77). Consid-
erably more startling is the possibility of human chimera: Boklage cites
instances of individuals carrying two different blood types and specu-
lates that in these cases fraternal twins may have merged in the womb
to become a single person (Wright, 1997: 83).6 The dividing line
between singletons and twins seems less than clear.
The final chapters of Wright’s study demonstrate the complexity of
the interaction between genes and the environment, both in the indi-
vidual and in human evolution. He outlines arguments that suggest
that not only our perception of our experiences, but even our environ-
ment may reflect a genetic disposition, for as we grow older we tend
increasingly to produce our own living conditions. These arguments
question the possibility of usefully distinguishing genetic from envir-
onmental factors and echo the misgivings expressed by Farber in
Identical Twins Reared Apart: A Reanalysis.7 Farber casts doubt on a
further opposition at the basis of many twin studies: that between
twins raised together and twins raised separately. These apparent poles
of difference conceal a great deal of variation both in the degree of
separation, and in the twins’ awareness of the twinship (1981: 15–21).
Lookalike twins: are they the same or different? The question could
lead us to ponder the mutual exclusiveness of the categories that
govern our thinking about identity, to question the self/other opposi-
tion. More commonly, however, embedded in a network of suspi-
ciously neat binaries (identical/non-identical, monozygotic/dizygotic,
singleton/twin, genes/environment, together/apart), twins have pro-
vided researchers with an opportunity to reinforce binary thinking.
One field where this is particularly obvious is the study of sexuality.
Quest for the ‘gay gene’
Doubts and queries such as those outlined above have not derailed the
huge research enterprise of twin studies. The largest concentration of
such research occurs at the University of Minnesota where, by 1997,
intensive studies of some 238 sets of multiples reared apart had been
conducted under the direction of Thomas Bouchard. Many of the cases

received extensive press coverage, not least because of the extraordin-
ary specificity of the similarities between some of the twins: resem-
blances ranged from nail-biting, giggling, nightmares, preferred brand
of beer, to what they named their dog, and even the fact that they had
undergone vasectomies (Wright, 1997: 38–58).8
This level of detail can be contrasted with some of the twin studies
published on homosexuality. For one abiding use of twin studies has
related to the ‘gay gene’ hypothesis, the idea that homosexuality may
be genetically determined and therefore inherited. The quest for the
gay gene, which has gained momentum in the last twenty years,
arouses ambivalence in queer circles. As Eve Sedgwick points out, more
important than the outcome are the motivations driving the research:
gays may rejoice at homosexuality being judged ‘natural,’ but given
the lack of public enthusiasm for boosting numbers of gays and the
medical paradigm of gene therapy, the quest may lead to prevention
or ‘treatment’ options (1990: 42–4; cf. LeVay, 1996: 255–71; Haynes,
1995: 110).
Twin studies are a major tool in this quest, and Geoff Puterbaugh’s
Twins and Homosexuality: A Casebook (1990), a collection of research
papers first published from 1952 to 1985, chronicles their use. All
report on twin studies that ascertain the concordance rate for homo-
sexuality among monozygotic and dizygotic twins, and the framing
of the papers in Puterbaugh’s introduction indicates his purpose:
the collection is intended to emphasise the importance of a genetic
component in male homosexuality.
Striking is the binarism of these studies: subjects are expected to fit
neatly into the categories homosexual or heterosexual, and any ambi-
guity is seen as problematic. Sexual histories that disturb the clarity of
the divide are classed as ‘bisexual,’ irrespective of whether or not the
label corresponds to the subject’s self-description, as in the following
quotation from a University of Minnesota research team’s paper, first
published in 1985: ‘One member of pair 4 had a homosexual affair,
which was intense and prolonged, so that we regard her as bisexual,
although she describes herself as exclusively heterosexual since her
second marriage in her late twenties.’ (Eckert et al., 1990: 129). Here it
is assumed that there are only two conceivable forms sexuality might
take, with at a pinch the possibility of alternation between the two.
This lack of options exacerbates the difficulty of determining how the
twins fit into the overarching binary of concordance and discordance.
The same paper discusses a pair of male twins, one of whom regards
himself as exclusively homosexual and the other as exclusively hetero-

sexual, however the latter’s affair with an older man when in his teens
allows the researcher to put a question mark over this case: ‘Whether
to count [this] pair concordant or discordant or partially one or the
other, is problematic’ (132). In other words, despite the contrasts in
the twins’ self-description and sixteen years of monogamous marriage
versus a series of homosexual relationships, the researchers with their
limited categories cannot decide whether they should tick the boxes
‘same’ or ‘different’ with regard to sexuality. We are a long way from
the detail of the study of twins who both married women called Linda
and had a dog called Toy (Wright, 1997: 39).
Many recent studies use similarly limited/limiting classifications:
although King and McDonald (1992) and Kendler et al. (2000) rely on
self-description by informants rather than inflicting unwanted labels
on them, only three categories are offered in each study (homosexual/
gay, heterosexual, bisexual) and in the second these are then collapsed
into two – heterosexual and other. Those who do not identify as het-
erosexual are lumped together in a homogenising of the Other.
Certainly Kendler et al. acknowledge that ‘the assessment of the com-
plex phenotype of sexual orientation with a single item is far from
ideal. Sexual orientation involves, at a minimum, dimensions of sexual
fantasy, attraction, and behavior, none of which was explicitly cap-
tured by our single item’ (2000: 1846). While this admission at least
indicates awareness of the problem, identifying sexuality through a
tick in one of two or three boxes is a common methodology even in
recent twin studies of homosexuality. And of course such methodology
fits the social fantasy of homosexuals and heterosexuals constituting
entirely separate groups of people.
While media interest and much of the work of the Minnesota project
have focused on an extreme level of detail and nuance in similarities
between twins, down to the name of the women they divorced and the
crooking of their little finger, twin studies researching homosexuality
have tended to focus on the most general level of likeness. Aston-
ishingly unconcerned with the fine detail of sexual attraction is the
following 1980 experiment on a pair of male monozygotic twins:
The subjects’ penile volume responses were recorded by a method

described previously while they were shown thirty 10-sec segments
of moving pictures, ten of nude men, ten of nude women, and ten
of landscapes. The segments were presented in random order at
1-min intervals. (McConaghy and Blaszcynski, 1990: 85)
Only one of the twins claimed to be homosexual and the stated aim of
the experiment was to find out whether the ostensibly heterosexual co-
twin was telling the truth. But how much does this blunt instrument
tell us about sexuality? What kinds of men and women were shown,
indeed what kind of landscapes? What positions, activities, body parts
were represented, suggested or highlighted? As Sedgwick remarks,
It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along

which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from
that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain
acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain fre-
quency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or
power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.),
precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of
the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now
ubiquitous category of ‘sexual orientation.’ (1990: 8, cf. 22–6.)
Concordance data on dimensions such as those Sedgwick suggests are

scarce to say the least in published twin studies on sexuality.
Happily, there are exceptions to the dichotomising into het and
homo. Heston and Shields’ 1968 paper refuses simply to muster all
same-sex experiences together, and discusses similarities and differ-
ences in relationships, attitudes, partners and sexual practices between
two pairs of homosexual twins in the same sibship (1990: 54–8). More
recently, the large studies conducted by Bailey and Pillard (1991) and
Bailey et al. (1993) use Kinsey’s 1948 seven-point scale to rate both
sexual behaviour and fantasies (although results are still grouped into
the broad categories ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual,’ the latter includ-
ing homosexual/gay and bisexual), while Whitam et al. (1993) use an
eighteen-page questionnaire on sexuality and the Kinsey scale to deter-
mine concordance or partial concordance.9 A couple of methodological
critiques have appeared: Byne and Parsons question the widespread
assumption that ‘homosexuality is a unitary construct that is culturally
transcendent’ (1993: 229); Haynes critiques the binarism of twin
studies into homosexuality, promoting use of the Kinsey scale and con-
cluding with the caution that ‘there is evidently great plasticity in ori-
entation, as one moves from one point on the sexual continuum to
another, for differing lengths of time, and at different periods of one’s
life’ (1995: 111). Finally Kirk et al. (2000) use multiple measures of
sexual orientation (behaviours, attitudes and feelings), creating the
conditions for a more nuanced statistical analysis.
Kallmann’s 1952 study found 100 per cent concordance between

monozygotic twins for homosexuality. These results have never been
replicated, and the sampling and methodology have been harshly cri-
ticised and are generally considered to be seriously flawed. In the inter-
vening years, twins concordant or discordant for homosexuality have
appeared in research papers in varying proportions. My interest in
these studies is not in their results – most of those published in the
1990s indicate that monozygotic twins are twice as likely to be
concordant for sexuality as dizygotic twins (cf. LeVay, 1996: 175) – but
in what those results are taken to mean. What does it mean to say that
homosexuality is genetic to a (greater or lesser) degree? Wright quotes
Pillard in conversation on this question: ‘Is it a propensity to like some-
body who is sort of the same as you versus somebody who’s different,
or to like a man versus a woman, or to be very sensitive or what? […]
It’s hard even to speculate because we don’t know that much about
how genes affect behaviour’ (Wright, 1997: 73). It is in addressing
this question – the meaning of the quest for the gay gene, a question
generally passed over in silence in the research literature – that Robert
Rodi’s gay retelling of the reunited twins tale proves useful. For while
Rodi’s characters could be recruited to support the conclusions of twin
studies showing monozygotic concordance for homosexuality – they’re
both gay on the Kinsey scale – his novel demonstrates, in human detail
both dazzling and drab, just how little that tells us.
Rodi’s Drag Queen: multiple gay identities
Robert Rodi’s parodic novel Drag Queen can be read as a comedy of

confusion in the tradition of Twelfth Night, with more than a trace of
the Tootsie strain of cross-dressing comedy. Its humour draws both on
confusion between twins of mixed gender (or gender expression), and
on non-recognition of the same face gendered differently. The author
is clearly on to a winner with these themes: twin comedies have a
history of success going back well before Shakespeare to Plautus and
Menander, and the (straight) cross-dressing comedies Some Like It Hot
and Tootsie were voted the two funniest American movies of all time
by the American Film Institute in 2000. As a gay variation on the
reunited twins theme, Drag Queen fulfils its dust-jacket promise of
hilarity, so if we return to the question driving this book and ask what
is at stake in this retelling of a familiar twin tale, one response might
be to see it as a story (re)told for maximum laughs. And yet, an import-
ant element of this comic tradition is strangely missing from the book:
the ‘bedtrick,’10 often the principal source of mirth in such comedies.

There are no duped wooers or bedfellows in Drag Queen, which should
alert us to the possibility of reading this parody in terms of other
genres. Taking my cue from the references in the book’s early scenes to
television documentaries about twins, I propose to read the novel as an
implicit commentary on twin studies of homosexuality. If twins are
our window on to ‘the mystery of identity’ (Wright, 1997), Rodi’s
novel uses twins to explore a range of contemporary understandings of
sexual identity, allowing the narrative to be read as an unstated inter-
vention into the gay gene debate.
For into this debate swings Mitchell Sayer – well not exactly swings,
trots more like it, taking especial care not to disturb his immaculate
appearance and pristine townhouse, distressed and preoccupied at
the discovery that his lapis lazuli letter opener is not in its proper
place. Caricatures are the stock in trade of parody, and from its first
page Drag Queen introduces us to a gay stereotype: the obsessively neat,
successful professional with impeccable taste, in awe of his mother.
The novel opens with a transparently contrived revelation to unleash
the plot and wreak havoc in Mitchell’s circumspect and tidy life.
Mitchell’s wealthy society mother announces her intention to join a
Tibetan convent and confesses to Mitchell not only that he was
adopted, but that he has an identical twin brother. Mitchell’s immedi-
ate reaction to the disclosure is to reflect on his sexuality and wonder
how identical his co-twin might be in this regard. And he refers to
‘some so-called news magazine show in which it was reported that
identical twins – even long-separated identical twins – almost always
possessed identical character traits’ (Rodi, 1995: 8). In other words, his
first reaction is to relate his situation and sexuality to a popularised
version of twin studies. His second reaction is to admit to himself
‘an incestuous element to this speculation’ (9) and compare this
fantasy of the only child to the disgust of gay friends at the thought
of sex with their brothers. His response reflects research findings on
sexual relations between male identical twins: that twins reared
together are never sexually attracted to each other, while homosexual
twins raised apart typically report attraction to their co-twin, a pattern
Puterbaugh puts down to ‘a near-universal pattern of incest-avoidance’
(1990: xiv; cf. Wright, 1997: 46).11
Rodi’s text thus engages early with patterns revealed by twin studies
on homosexuality. This continues during his first contact with his
twin, by telephone, during which Mitchell again refers to the televi-
sion show and its mythologisation of research on identical twins (19)
and speculates on his twin’s sexuality: after hanging up, Mitchell

‘reflected with pleasure on the conversation – on Donald’s lilting
tone, peppered with “honeys” and “dolls.” There was no doubt about
it: Donald was gay’ (21). And if Donald, like Mitchell, is gay, then
obviously they must be very much alike. But the book quickly turns
the tables on twin studies narratives. For at the first face to face
meeting of the twins, Mitchell is confronted not with his mirror
image, not with someone ‘exactly like him’ (8), but with Donald’s
alter ego Kitten Kaboodle, flamboyant drag queen and singer at the
Tam-Tam Club. This is not the recognition scene he had rehearsed;
this is not what the infotainment programme had led him to expect.12
Rather, the confrontation raises the question of the extent to
which Mitchell and Kitten can be regarded as belonging to a single
category of sexual identity. And that question leads to another: just
how meaningful is it to discover that monozygotic twins tend to be
concordant for homosexuality, that a gay twin is statistically likely
to have a gay co-twin? In fact it is precisely as (un)revealing as
finding out that identical twins are concordant for heterosexuality,
when you consider the range of partners and partnerships than can
be encompassed within this broad category. The very different gay
stereotypes assigned to the two brothers make the point that sharing
a hypothetical gay gene might be largely irrelevant in determining
sexual identity. Rather a genetic disposition will be expressed
through the cultural options available, which vary historically and
geographically. The het/homo divide unquestioningly accepted in
Puterbaugh’s collection of twin studies and indeed more generally
in our culture is a fairly recent invention, as Foucault (1976), Katz
(1996) and other historians of sexuality have argued. Since sexual
behaviour cannot be isolated from the cultural positions through
which we engage in it, presumably, before the late nineteenth
century, a ‘gay gene’ (and indeed a ‘straight gene’) would have
produced quite different identities and conduct again from those
represented by Rodi’s pool of players.
The range of gay identities Rodi invokes is more varied than the
polarities represented by Mitchell and Kitten. Just in case the reader
was tempted to binarise homosexuals into outrageous drag queens and
anally retentive aesthetes, there is Mitchell’s leather-man friend Simon,
who represents another gay subculture, fiercely virile and contemptu-
ous of the drag scene. Here are three contemporary cultural options for
a gay gene to pursue, sufficiently different to empty meaning from the
notion of genetic determination.
Stereotypes – not unlike twin studies – thrive on clear-cut categories,

preferably two: us and them. It is ironic that a genre that trades in stereo-
types, namely parody, may function to undermine their application, as
Rodi’s novel does. Rodi is not out to dismiss stereotypes, but to displace
them. If Mitchell sees Kitten as ‘the living embodiment of every cliché
straights had about faggots’ (28), clearly the same could be said of
Mitchell himself and of Simon. All three are not just ‘out,’ but are out-an-
out caricatures. However the combined effect of the three characters is
such that none can be seen to represent single-handedly the category
‘gay.’ Rather they expose the tensions within a supposed community.
In Declining the Stereotype, Mireille Rosello argues that if stereotypes
cannot be eradicated (1998: 128), they can perhaps be ‘declined.’
Sometimes, however, declining in the sense of simply refusing is
neither possible nor indeed strategic, and so Rosello invokes the lin-
guistic sense of declension: to decline a noun is to recite all its possible
forms and variations. She suggests that attention to the formal charac-
teristics of a stereotype can work to deprive it of some of its harmful
potential (1998: 10–11). Drag Queen is not unlike a declension of the
gay stereotype – a focus on all its possible forms and variations – for
Rodi’s strategy is to complicate stereotypes by multiplying them.
Rather than contesting a gay male stereotype by making Mitchell
less prissy, he does the opposite, pushing Mitchell’s character as far as
possible into the caricature of the fastidious fop, but at the same time
introducing the equally clichéd but widely divergent gay characters of
ultra-masculinist Simon and histrionic Kitten. Not even the drag
queens are a homogeneous bunch, Kitten sharing the classification
with thick-set Amazonian bouncer Carlotta. If, for twin studies
researchers, ‘homosexual’ is the answer to a question, for Rodi it needs
a follow-up question – ‘what sort?’ – in order to be meaningful. Rodi’s
readers know (or learn) that homosexuality is not a single sexuality
let alone a monolithic lifestyle. Rodi’s sharp wit contrasts with the
bluntness of the research instruments used in so many of the twin
studies pertaining to homosexuality. While the latter tend simply to
binarise sexuality into homosexual/heterosexual, Rodi disrupts the
dyad through the proliferation of identities.
Rosello warns, however, that the multiplication of images is not
sufficient to counteract the power of stereotypes, and we can extend
the application of her logic to the power of the het/homo binary:
It is true that the strength of stereotypical images often comes from

their uniqueness, because uniqueness begs for simple equations
(community x = delinquency), but the grammar or syntax of the

stereotype can survive even if plurality is introduced. ‘All Arabs
are …’ can be followed by several adjectives or nouns, even contra-
dictory sets of words. When the grammar of stereotyping is com-
bined with diversity, a list results that adds the force of a litany to
the rhetoric of formulas adopted by stereotypes’ (1998: 72).
She suggests that what is additionally required, in order to dis-

credit and disarm a stereotype, is attention to its formal characteris-
tics, through, for example, ironic repetition and carefully framed
quotations (1998: 11).
Rodi obliges: when Mitchell first sets eyes on Kitten and sees ‘the
living embodiment of every cliché straights had about faggots’ (1995:
28), he does not simply see a stereotypical drag queen, but a quotation
of someone else’s pernicious stereotype, dangerous to himself. And in
order to see her this way, he must align himself momentarily with a
straight line of sight, while simultaneously distancing himself from it.
This split or stereo perspective is the very definition of irony, and alerts
the reader to Mitchell’s initial blindness to his own conformity to a
cliché that is only apparently benign.
Rodi’s quotation of stereotypes undermines not only the clichés
themselves but the classificatory system that spawned them. All three
main characters see themselves as the epitome of gayness. However all
three have different preconceived ideas about who rightfully belongs
in the category ‘gay’ and who does not. Having struggled for accept-
ance as a gay corporate lawyer, Mitchell discovers his own prejudices
about how gays should comport themselves. He rejects Kitten’s cavort-
ing as unbecoming to any self-respecting gay, but Mitchell is not the
only one to impose a straight-jacketed view of the authentically gay.
Perhaps leather-cinched is a more appropriate metaphor in Simon’s
case. Simon is far from reticent in rejecting Kitten and her kittenish
ways, excluding femininity of any kind from gay membership and
even seeing drag queens as a different species altogether: ‘They’re not a
third sex, they’re a second species. Something vital is missing, some-
thing – something human’ (51). From within the ghetto, Simon repeats
the ultimate statement of exclusion and excuse for atrocities: the
Others are so different that they can no longer be classed as human
beings. And yet, the reporting of his speech (‘Tweak. Tweak.’) is con-
tinually interrupted (‘Tweak. Tweak.’) by the distracting and poten-
tially arousing way in which Simon pulls at his unpierced nipple, an
intrusive reminder of Simon’s sexuality and the fact that he too
belongs to a group that has been persecuted as less than human. And
when his little tirade is immediately followed by a scene in which his
friends chant ‘Simon says, Simon says’ (52) we see how transparently
formulaic his rendition of the division into us/them, same/other,
human/inhuman has been.
No-one is, however, categorically innocent. Even Kitten, the victim
of these exclusionary classifications by Mitchell and Simon, is caught
out with her categorising. Unlike the others, she does not reject partic-
ular forms of (homo)sexuality. It is not that her use of the label ‘gay’ is
too narrow, rather it is too wide. She does not exclude, but includes
too readily. She is being courted by Zack Crespin, an old frat brother of
Mitchell’s, but when she broaches the subject of his gayness, Zack pulls
her up short:
‘I’m not gay. I love women. Love ‘em.’ he shrugged. ‘Probably more
than any guy you’ll ever know. Been with all kinds – fat, skinny,
black, white, old, young. Hell, it’s tough for me to think of a type of
chick I don’t want to screw.’ He turned to her. ‘Which is pretty
much why I’m with you, kid. To me, you’re just one more kind of
chick – a chick with a dick.’ (146)
Even Kitten has fallen into the trap of using categories with overly tidy
edges. Zack does not fit neatly into a simple homo/het binary, and
there are more possibilities than simply straight or gay. If Mitchell,
Kitten and Simon complicate the dichotomy by multiplying gay stereo-
types, Zack disturbs it by straddling the divide. And yet all these char-
acters would be expected to tick the same box on the behaviour
geneticists’ questionnaire. That Mitchell, Kitten, Simon and Zack are all
considered gay men at least some of the time, gives an idea of the
range of paths a ‘gay gene’ might take.
Mitchell’s encounters with his twin force him to reconsider his
definition of gayness. He confronts this question as he surveys the
clientele of Dreamweaver’s bar, trying to determine gender and sexual-
ity: ‘He couldn’t decide if this place was straight or gay, camp or hip, or
something else he didn’t yet know the name of’ (89–90). ‘Queer’ is of
course the name that springs to mind, a more nebulous and inclusive
term than gay. Queer is an unstable category, its diverse membership
united only by a lack of identification with normative sexual identities,
and to some extent Drag Queen recounts the queering of Mitchell’s
outlook.13 Would queer then be a more appropriate umbrella term for
describing Rodi’s characters? Is queerness what Mitchell and Kitten
share in the way of sexuality? If so, this would suggest that twin studies
researchers might do better to seek a queer gene – some loosely defined
propensity to stray from the straight and narrow – than a gay one. But
the quest for a queer gene is doomed before it starts. However non-
specific in referring to sexual practices, the term queer is highly cultur-
ally specific in its usage. And no, Mitchell and Kitten could not be said
to share queerness. Like ‘gay,’ the term ‘queer’ is problematic in its
application to Rodi’s characters: Mitchell, for most of the book, is
emphatically not queer; womaniser Zack is unlikely to accept the label;
and Simon recoils from any contiguity with drag queens. Only Kitten/
Donald uses the epithet in self-description when posing as Mitchell –
nearly blowing the cover, for it is not a term by which Mitchell refers
to himself (242).
The difficulty arises from the fact that although queer confounds the
either/or constraints of the homo/het binary, it does not escape bin-
aries altogether, and in fact exists by virtue of an oppositional relation
with the term straight. Halperin makes this clear when he writes:
Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the

legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it
necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer,’ then,
demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the norm-
ative – a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men
but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized
because of her or his sexual practices […]. (Halperin, 1995: 62)
The queer/normative opposition is embodied by the flamboyant drag

queen/respectable gay lawyer pair. Mitchell is the epitome of the
straight gay. However much he may pride himself on being out of the
closet, he is censorious and uptight. He is a suit (albeit an Armani one),
committed to his career in corporate law, and reluctant to rock the
boat. Deeply shocked at Kitten’s capers, he immediately wishes ‘to
straighten out Donald (so to speak). Get him off this drag thing and
into a real, respectable lifestyle’ (28), and vows ‘to salvage his twin
from a life of irrelevancy and buffoonery’ (95). At the very least she
should wear ‘normal clothes’ (36) to their meeting. And he is no
less shocked at the Simon’s leather-club antics. For Mitchell, being
gay means being invisible, fitting in as much as possible: ‘He’d devoted
his life to proving to straight people that gays were no different
from them, that they were just as serious, just as hardworking – just as,
in a word, dull’ (28). His character epitomises Bersani’s paradox of gay
presence/absence (1995: 31–2, 67–8), whereby increasing mainstream

acceptance of gays (the gay presence) has been achieved by blending in
with the crowd, and disavowing any specific cultural presence (the gay
absence). Mitchell is, then, the straight gay who finally comes across to
meet his queer twin on her own ground, however straight/queer is not
a binary the book leaves intact, for Zack is the queer straight.
If sexual identities such as gay and queer are questioned in Rodi’s
novel, gender identities – male/female, masculine/feminine – are even
more explicitly disturbed. Predictably, gender categories are most obvi-
ously blurred by Kitten Kaboodle, who hovers between the roles of
Mitchell’s brother and sister (91). Mitchell asks why she does not have
The Operation, revealing his assumption that drag queens are men
who want to be women, and a lack of imagination as to alternatives to
these two genders. But it is Simon who takes the straight line to the
point where it turns back on itself. Distancing himself from any hint of
gay effeminacy, Simon proposes an exaggerated divide. In an effort to
eliminate any cross-contamination of gender, Simon’s club Darklords
has ‘an entirely gay membership’ and ‘gay’ here excludes drag queens:
‘We don’t have any truck with the feminine, Mitchell – the irrational,
emotional, anti-intellectual feminine’ (104–5). Mitchell’s flight from
the threat Kitten poses towards the hyper-masculine Darklords is a
parody of homophobia, as Mitchell is persuaded that drag queens are
not human but ‘walking agents of chaos’: ‘Men should be men, Simon.
Women should be women. Confusing the two – that’s an act of sedi-
tion. Of anarchism’ (104). However the gender divide is already crossed
in Simon’s discourse when he explains that the ‘[m]asculine concepts
like order, tradition, hierarchy’ (105) he reveres are embodied in a
queen – the British monarch. Once again, Simon mouths patriarchal
platitudes about the vague threats to the social order posed by the dis-
turbance of the opposition between masculine and feminine, while
unable even to separate the two in ideal form. And Mitchell, who
allows himself to be seduced both by the club’s ethos and by one of its
members, Kip, soon discovers that Kip with his weakness for Broadway
musicals is a queen at heart: ‘the insidious tentacles of the feminine’
reach into even ‘the most ultra-masculine enclave’ (121).
Gender identities are further disturbed by Mitchell’s manipulative
sister Paula and colleague Zoe, both of whom are much more closely
aligned with the drag queens than with other female characters.
Donald (Kitten in mufti) understands Paula ‘instinctively’ and ‘ad-
mire[s] her instinct for getting what she wanted’ (241). A mere pawn
in Paula’s scheme for self-advancement, ‘Donald shut his eyes and
wondered, Is this how Mitchell feels when he can’t get rid of Kitten?’
(230). Paula is ‘all sharp angles and hard edges,’ one of those women
‘so powerfully beautiful they could actually afford to act mannish’
(163), a masculine drag queen.
Zoe is similarly larger than life and over-colourful, both in her dress
(lime-green and bejewelled, 160) and in her plot to muscle in on
Mitchell’s position at the office. In her perfidy she is explicitly aligned
with Regina Upright, the chanteuse who pushes Kitten from her slot at
the Tam Tam Club. The twins realise that their lives are running in
parallel: each is being stabbed in the back by a female rival from
the same (that is, drag queen) mould (187). More dramatically, Zoe is
dragged off the street as a drag queen when Mitchell’s misguided plan
to have his twin kidnapped and ‘deprogrammed’ goes awry. Zoe is mis-
taken for Kitten, abducted and subjected to aversion therapy for drag
queens over twelve hours, and has to be groped at the crotch before
her captors will accept their error. A supposedly ‘natural’ woman, Zoe
is to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from the line-up at
the Tam Tam Club.
In a series of classic deconstructive moves, binaries – male/female,
homo/het, gay/straight, queer/straight – are transposed and undone.
Presumed contraries coexist and oppositions are realigned as Rodi’s
characters complicate and disorganise apparently discrete categories of
identity. In addition to perturbing the pigeon-holes, the novel can-
vasses several contemporary interpretations of sexual and gender iden-
tity: is it what’s in your genes? or what’s in your jeans? or how well
you carry off the performance? We have seen that Drag Queen prob-
lematises the genetic explanation (or at least oversimplified versions
of the gay gene hypothesis), and mocks the kind of biological dualism
that blithely aligns genitals with gender. Its engagement with the
notion of identity as performative is more complex, and leads us to a
discussion of competing conceptions of the self in contemporary
culture.
Dragging for identity
Identical twins routinely raise the question of identity, and we shall see
that Drag Queen recycles the conventions of twin comedies in order to
engage with competing discourses of the self. As the story unfolds, the
novel shifts from a tension between constructivist and essentialist posi-
tions towards a more fluid understanding of selfhood. The tension and its
resolution are played out in the evolving relationship between the twins.
The gay gene hypothesis relies on a premise of sexual identity as

hardwired and immutable. Mitchell (who sees eye to eye with the tele-
vision documentary on twin resemblance) subscribes to this view, and
interprets his sexuality through the ‘coming-out’ discourse: his gayness
had always defined him, and was finally acknowledged publicly when
he came out (8). It is part of his core identity, a true self that must
not be denied, a notion reflected in Mitchell’s promise to himself,
on coming out, to tell the truth without exception from that day on
(74).14
If Mitchell sees himself as truthful and true, he considers Kitten to be
both a liar and a fake, her dress a costume and her persona a pretence.
He accuses her of living a lie (73), of running away from her real self
(208). Kitten, however, turns Mitchell’s true/false distinction around:
rather than representing the fake to Mitchell’s real, Kitten en grande toi-
lette claims to be an original to Mitchell’s copy. She is a creature of her
own creation, one of a kind (204), while nondescript Mitchell is a grey-
scale photocopy of an identity, ‘a big gray absence of a person’ (209,
cf. 241). Explaining her disinterest in sex reassignment surgery, she
remarks: ‘Kitten was one hundred percent my creation. So, why would
I want to get some surgeon involved, make him partly responsible
for her?’ (207). Although Mitchell impugns her claim to uniqueness,
saying she looks ‘like Ivana Trump’s stunt-double’ (64), Kitten succeeds
in rewriting Mitchell’s dichotomy real/pretence as original/copy and
then switching the content of the categories. Rather than drag queens,
for Kitten it is copycats such as lip-synchers and conformist lawyers
who are the ones with no real self, with a derived identity.
From Kitten’s perspective, lies – such as the melodramatic life-story
Kitten tells a journalist (68) – are an important aspect of self-invention.
Along with clothes and coiffure, they are the construction materials
for the self. Self-construction is an iterative process: ‘I start over every
morning. Build myself up from scratch.’ (36). Hair in particular effects
the passage from one identity to another: ‘Donald took his long blond
wig, bent over, and affixed it to his scalp. But it wasn’t Donald
who stood up and tossed the silken tresses into place; it was Kitten
Kaboodle, the Doyenne of Despair’ (38).
Kitten places her self-creation in a female tradition of stardom: in
the Golden Age of Hollywood, while male actors ‘were all so natural,’
able simply to draw on a longstanding masculine iconography of the
heroic, female actors had to construct their characters from scratch
(205). The lack of any female iconic tradition other than ‘the Virtuous
Wife and the Whore’ was compensated for by outrageous theatricality.
Female historical figures found themselves in the same position of

having to invent themselves. The link to drag is made explicit in the
discussion of Elizabeth the First: ‘Probably the first drag-queen
role model in history. Everything about her was the most fabulous
artifice, and she carried it off like some legendary Warner Brothers
movie idol’ (206). Thus Kitten sees artifice as the prerequisite for ori-
ginality, not its antithesis, while seeming naturalness (à la Gary
Cooper, Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart) consists merely in adopting
existing personas.
Kitten’s identity is thus a performance in the Hollywood mould, and
it needs to be constantly rehearsed for others: ‘She had an uncanny
feeling that she was in a movie, playing a part. Must remember to act
like I feel something, she told herself. […] It helped her acting to have
an actual audience.’ (115) Although these are her thoughts when she
hears of her adoptive mother’s death, it applies more generally to her
sense of self. Kitten’s identity is both formed and performed in relation
to an (often anonymous) audience.
Thus far, the twins appear to represent the diametrically opposed
poles of essentialist and constructivist accounts of identity formation,
the poles of nature and nurture so important to twin studies research.
Mitchell focuses on the nature of identity (his own true nature) while
Kitten is more interested in its cultural construction. Mitchell sees
identity in terms of being, Kitten in terms of doing. As you might
expect with identical twins, however, the opposition is undermined.
There is an underlying sameness to the two interpretations.
Kitten’s position for most of the novel is in fact paradoxical, for she
wields the discourse of self-creation at the same time as she invokes
the ‘real me.’15 ‘This is me, this is the way I am. I could pretend to be
something I’m not for you, but I wouldn’t ask you to do that for me’
(61), she tells Mitchell. To create Kitten, ‘I kept dressing and acting out
until I reached a point where I felt like me – the point where I became
Kitten’ (207), she explains, and soon after she repeats to her twin that
Kitten, not Donald, is ‘the way I really am’ (209). Despite the avowed
self-construction, Kitten’s sense of self is not so far from Mitchell’s.
She too supports the idea of real and fake selves, and Donald – her
persona when in masculine attire – is the fake. Only when wounded by
Regina’s perfidy is there a moment where Kitten doubts her self: ‘And
this indeed was the measure of her despair: that for the first time in her
life, she felt more comfortable as Donald’ (179). It is as if there is at all
times a pre-existing interior self that the visible self-creation needs to
match.
Kitten, then, although a constructivist, is still far from subscribing to

Judith Butler’s concept of performative identity. In Gender Trouble
(1990), Butler argues that gender is a highly regulated cultural perform-
ance, and that the repetition and continuity of this performance create
the effect of gender identity: ‘acts and gestures, articulated and enacted
desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core’
(1990: 136). Rather than stemming from a pre-existing essence of the
self, our sense of self is produced by copying the performance of others
in (among other aspects) gender expression. Butler goes on to suggest
that drag queens, in flaunting this process, expose the imitation that
passes for the real, the contrived artlessness of the spectacle of the
‘natural’ woman: ‘The parodic repetition of “the original,” […] reveals
the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the
natural and the original’ (1990: 31) (and indeed this is precisely what
occurs when Zoe is mistaken for a drag queen). Thus drag queen is to
‘natural’ woman (and even to straight-laced lawyer) ‘not as copy is
to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy’ (1990: 31).
If Mitchell proclaims the truth of his gay self, Kitten too aspires to
realness. Indeed both twins lay claim to superior authenticity in their
identity. There is, however, little chance of either of them winning the
debate, for despite their stated views, they embody Butler’s argument:
as identical twins they undo the hierarchy of original and copy, being
genetic copies without an original blueprint. Although clones of one
another, neither twin provided the model. As if to emphasise this fact,
there is no record of which twin was born first (78). No hierarchy can
be established. These twins were born double, neither more authentic
than the other.
The twins only start to rethink their positions, however, as events
unfold towards the end of the novel and the conventions of comic
twin tales are brought to bear on questions of sexual identity. Classic
twin scenes are those in which one twin dresses up as the other, one is
mistaken for the other, one recognises (him/herself in) the other. Rodi
defers these until quite late in the novel.
Comedies of errors
In most twin comedies, confusion between lookalikes reigns from early

in the text, and is then resolved in the conclusion, in which identities
are sorted out. In Drag Queen, however, such confusion – constantly
expected – is delayed. When Kitten flounces into Mitchell’s office, there
is no possibility that she will be taken for Mitchell and asked to negotiate
real estate deals. And Kitten’s agent is similarly unlikely to ask Mitchell
to model his hands as Kitten does. These twins are, then, not unwitting
doppelgängers, mistaken for one another. But the moment of high
farce inevitably arrives towards the end of the book. It is preceded by
Mitchell’s plea to see his twin in male garb, a request that makes explicit
what Mitchell desires from his twin: to see himself in/as another:
‘[…] What if I come over tomorrow, after work, and we just go out
for a couple of drinks? With you as you.’
‘You’ve already met me as me.’
‘You know what I mean. With you as me, then.’ (188)
The request is not to ‘come as yourself’ but to come as Mitchell, as

Mitchell’s self, to be identical to Mitchell. Donald obliges, and so the
two players are finally seen to resemble each other uncannily, with
only Kitten’s long fingernails distinguishing them: ‘He looked amaz-
ingly, astonishingly, like Mitchell’ (202). This is the first time Mitchell
has been able to recognise himself in his twin. Several drinks later,
under Donald’s deft hand with make-up and under protest, Mitchell is
transformed and recognises his twin in himself: ‘I … I’m Kitten! he
realized with horror’ (212). Mitchell’s giddy moment is not the verti-
ginous experience of seeing double, but the disconcerting one of seeing
Kitten and Donald simultaneously. Paradoxically, in order to resemble
his identical twin, Mitchell has to be made up to look quite unlike
himself, while Kitten too has to change appearance to something that
feels decidedly uncomfortable, and unrecognisable as herself.
In initiating Mitchell’s makeover, Donald reasons that the only way
Mitchell will ever understand his perspective is by seeing it from the
inside. Little does he guess that he too will experience a new way of
seeing. Being dressed as Donald (that is, as Kitten in drag) paves the
way for change, splitting Donald and Kitten and allowing them to be
seen as two characters. Mitchell’s twin is referred to as Donald (and
with masculine pronouns) throughout the latter part of the novel,
opening up other possibilities for understanding Kitten’s identity.
The clowning begins when an urgent call from Mitchell’s boss sees
Donald take his place in corporate negotiations, while Mitchell finds
himself performing Kitten’s routine at the Tam-Tam to save her job.
Interestingly there is no bedtrick involved in the confusion of iden-
tities, no substituting one for the other in romantic encounters. Rather
this is a ‘worktrick,’ in which each attempts to embody the other’s
professional persona.
Convinced of the constructedness of Kitten’s self, Donald at last

realises the performative nature of Mitchell’s identity when he has
to carry it off. ‘When was the last time I was out in this identity?’ he
muses, but then realises: ‘Of course, he wasn’t going anywhere as
Donald, now. He was going as Mitchell’ (222). His way of assuming a
masculine identity is to play Mitchell, carefully hiding his tell-tale
fingernails, the key to twin recognition in Drag Queen.16 The supposed
naturalness of Mitchell’s lawyer figure is shown as something that does
not come naturally, but requires stagecraft.17 Donald’s point of refer-
ence for doing Mitchell is television: ‘He’d seen enough episodes of
“L.A. Law” to fake it.’ (248). But faking it means that he still clings to
the notion of the real self.
That changes, however, when Donald (as Mitchell) watches (Mitchell
as) Kitten on stage: ‘and there in the bright blue spotlight appeared
a vision of – himself. His other self. Kitten!’ (245). Kitten drifts from
being the essence of self to the ‘other self’ to an identity increasingly
detached from her creator. Donald surprises himself by ‘taking mental
notes, like, Vibrato on the first note in the phrase instead of the last; I’ll
have to try that’ (247), learning how better to perform Kitten’s identity
from Mitchell’s reinvention. Mitchell, in jollying up the hitherto tragic
stage persona with a rendition of ‘Put on a happy face,’ produces a
Kitten no less real. The song functions as a refrain, alluding to a per-
formative notion of identity, and the possibility of self-transformation.
Meanwhile Mitchell, through his (literal) performance of Kitten, ex-
periences a drag self that no longer seems untrue, and Donald even
begins to enjoy butch role-playing, using his lowest register to come
on to queen Marina (243). By the time Mitchell’s boss attempts to
re-establish identities – ‘Which one of you is Mitchell Sayer?’ (251) –
neither twin claims the identity to they were so attached at the begin-
ning of the novel, and neither twin has an investment in the authentic
self. Mitchell proudly declares: ‘Don’t look at me. My name is Kitten
Kaboodle’ (252) while his brother introduces himself as Donald.
The twins have moved from their polarised viewpoints to sharing a
revised conception of identity, one symbolised by a recurring image in
Drag Queen. Relatively early in the novel, while Kitten is being inter-
viewed for a magazine story, something seemingly extraneous occurs
outside the window to interrupt both the interview – Kitten blurts out
‘Is that a body in the river?’ (67) – and the novel, in that the event is
never connected with the plot. Concurrent with the progress of the
interview are attempts to recover the body. The two are only loosely
associated in the text: firstly by Mitchell’s desire to ‘trade[ ] places with
the corpse’ rather than answer questions about his connection with
drag (68) and secondly by the journalist’s comment ‘Fascinating,’ for ‘it
wasn’t clear whether she meant Kitten’s story, or the crane the police
boat was now positioning above the floating corpse’ (69). Mitchell’s
wish is at first glance simply another way of saying ‘I’d rather be dead.’
But the parallel between Kitten’s fiction of the twins’ family origins
and the floating corpse makes Mitchell’s apparent death wish worth
pursuing further. Kitten fishes for a life-story to suit the occasion, while
the anonymous floating body the police are fishing out is severed from
a life-story. Both give rise to speculation and invention. Both avoid any
anchoring of identity. If we reinterpret Mitchell’s comment along these
lines, the wish to trade places with the corpse becomes a desire for a
floating identity. This wish, we shall see, is ultimately fulfilled.
This interpretation is reinforced elsewhere in the novel. Being made
up feels like Shiatsu for Mitchell: ‘Feels a little bit like I’m floating […],
floating above a big forest’ (211). The sensation accompanies his trans-
formation into Kitten, his drift from one identity to another. Gazing
upon his unfamiliar reflection feels ‘curiously lightening’ (213) as he
slips anchor from his habitual straight-laced self.
Donald experiences a similar sensation when Mitchell appears on
stage as Kitten, for he is suddenly dissociated from the persona he has
created: ‘He felt suddenly weightless, as though he were dissipating,
turning to fog. […] Yet he looked down at his feet […] still solid, still
here. He hadn’t dissipated at all’ (245). The creature he had crafted and
whom he saw as his real self has somehow ceased to occupy the core of
his being. He now glides unattached, open to other possibilities of self-
hood: ‘Let Mitchell be Kitten from now on; Donald would take over as
Mitchell’ (248). Previously his essential self, Kitten is suddenly seen
as an identity that can be adopted by others, that can even be lent, a
floating identity.
Donald raises the anchor on Kitten, allowing her to become a
floating identity in the most literal way (atop a float in the Gay Pride
parade), and to be adopted by Mitchell. Mitchell (who has quit his
straight job and is now working for gay and lesbian clients) replaces
Donald (who has been knifed protecting him at the club) as Kitten
Kaboodle on the Tam-Tam parade float. Donald, arm in sling, looks on
with delight. He is planning his first holiday, both from Chicago and
from Kitten – now that Mitchell can continue the role in his absence.
And as the float passes, Simon is left speechless with confusion at the
now virtually interchangeable twins, who drift in and out of resem-
blance. Kitten has learnt to play Donald, Mitchell has learnt to play
Kitten, and both have learnt to enjoy it. No longer the truth of self,
nor a creation to match one’s core being, identity is now viewed less
earnestly as something to (role-)play with, and something from which
you can even take a holiday.
Traditionally, twin comedies move from confusion to clarity. Drag
Queen inverses this order: only at its conclusion can the twins be mis-
taken for each other. This comedy produces rather than resolves errors.
Conventionally, the dénouement serves to re-establish identities and
stabilise them through the romantic pairing off of each twin with a
separate partner, thus resolving the bedtrick(s) characteristic of the
genre. Drag Queen offers no such stabilisation of identity – its purpose
was never to calm gender or identity anxieties. It ends with Donald,
Kitten, Mitchell, and Simon – characters whose differences earlier
represented tensions and discontinuities that were papered over by
the label ‘gay’ – all present at the parade. They do not, however, simply
appear under one banner, in some kind of gay synthesis. Rather the
parade gathers a multitude of banners in a celebration of diversity.
And if the twins have become more similar, this does not mean that
they have both attained some definitive (genetically programmed?)
gay identity. Rather, through their relationship, they have each dis-
solved their ideas of the definitive self. It is their new enthusiasm for
metamorphosis that makes them interchangeable at times.
Parody and purpose
In her discussion of drag as parody and its potential for destabilising

heteronormative identities, Judith Butler asserts that ‘the task is not
whether to repeat but how to repeat’ (1990: 148). The repetition that is
parody can serve many purposes, not all of them transgressive. What
purposes then does Rodi’s retelling serve as he transposes a familiar
tale?
Not just a gay version of a comic tale, Rodi’s parody adapts a particu-
lar set of narrative habits to queer purposes, engaging the potential
of twins to destabilise oppositions and identities. The conventions of
the long-lost twin narrative play into Rodi’s hands as he light-heart-
edly undoes the dichotomies masculine/feminine, male/female, gay/
straight, same/different, identical/fraternal, nature/nurture, opposi-
tions underpinning the earnest enterprise of twins research.
The use of twins in the quest for the gay gene invites us to dwell on
the question: do you become gay or are you born that way? Reading
Drag Queen as a commentary on such twins research allows us to open
up such questions. Rodi makes us ask ‘just which way do you mean?’
by laying out some of the disparate ways in which a putative gay gene
might express itself. But he goes further in engaging with the overarch-
ing nature/nurture debate that prompts twin studies. Through the
story of Mitchell, Donald and Kitten, he suggests that the question is
not whether nature, nurture or some combination of the two makes
you who you are. For such a question implies that ‘who you are’ is
clear and steady, and can be contained in a case file based on an inter-
view or a set of questionnaires. Rather, Drag Queen raises the possibility
that ‘who we are’ depends to some extent on the day of the week and
the floating identities and stories we fish out for ourselves. Rodi
is less interested in whether nature and/or nurture moulds identity
than he is in the possibility of slipping out of the mould, whatever its
provenance. As such, he engages with a discourse of identity that
moves beyond debates between constructivists and essentialists
towards a postmodern fluidity of the self.
6
Twins and Nations: Tales of Cultural
Divides
National fissures
In 1997 a television news item signalling the fiftieth anniversary of the

partition of India and Pakistan included a cameo piece: twin brothers,
long separated by the border, were reunited to blow out the candles on
their fiftieth birthday cake.1 A perfect coincidence, of course, but also a
perfect illustration of the way in which twins are so readily called upon
to represent divided nations. The divisions in question may be across
or within borders: external (a nation divided from its neighbour, as in
this example) or internal (a nation fractured by political, ethnic or class
divisions).
However, although twins regularly function as a metaphor for these
national fissures, they do not always function in the same way. The use
of twins to symbolise nations may be perennial, but it is not unchang-
ing. Ancient stories of the founders and rulers of cities and civilisations
provide the earliest examples of such twins: Romulus and Remus at the
site of Rome; Zethus and Amphion building the walls of Thebes;
Eteocles and Polyneices elected co-kings of Thebes; Acrisias and Proëtus
dividing Argolis into the kingdoms of Argos and Tiryns; Atreus and
Thyestes as rival heirs of Mycenae; the biblical twins Esau and Jacob
begetting the two nations of Edom and Israel. These twins are fraternal
rather than identical and often embody opposed talents and social
principles: the hunter and the herdsman (Esau and Jacob), the labourer
and the musician (Zethus and Amphion) (Zazzo, 1984: 146–54). Most
notably, however, they are hostile rivals to the point of fratricide,
Zethus and Amphion standing alone among these legendary twins in
governing together peacefully. Twins in foundation myths disturb
the principle of primogeniture, the right of the first-born son to rule
114
Twins and Nations 115
(Zazzo, 1984: 154). The equality of the twins puts a question mark over
the legitimacy of power: the authority of the ruler is split at its source –
his birth. The rivalry and antagonism of these twins suggest a funda-
mental division threatening societies at their very origin, an obstacle
that needs to be overcome – usually by the death of one twin – in order
for social cohesion and order to be achieved.2
In modern twin tales of nations, on the other hand, twins tend to
represent the solution rather than the problem. Rather than creating
division, they provide a means for surmounting it. Typically, this plays
out as a triumph of sameness over difference, hence the prevalence of
identical twins. However, once again, we find that twins – even twins
used to represent nations – do not constitute a single topos.
This chapter traces some of the principal patterns found among
modern twin tales of divided nations, and focuses on the importance of
sameness and difference in each case. It then turns to a lesser-known
novel by Mauritian author Marie-Thérèse Humbert, which departs from
these patterns, not through a shift in genre or gender, but through a
change of topos. In A l’autre bout de moi, Humbert adapts a classic twin
tale to illustrate the dangers of privileging resemblance and unity as the
pre-requisites for harmonious relations in this postcolonial world of
hybrid identities and multiethnic nations. In the process, she questions
the very nature of resemblance and the role it plays in the formation of
identity.
‘Siamese’ nations
Most overtly allegorical in modern twin tales of cultural divides is

the appearance of conjoined twins to symbolise nationhood. Unlike
the rival twins of ancient legend, conjoined twins are used to portray
not so much national division, as national unity over division. In
‘America’s “United Siamese Brothers,”’ Alison Pingree analyses early
nineteenth-century pamphlets and biographical articles about Chang
and Eng, the twins from Siam, to demonstrate that these most famous
of conjoined twins were appropriated as a symbol of unity among the
American states following the Civil War. Publicity pamphlets for the
brothers show the image of ‘an eagle, sporting a banner reading
“E Pluribus Unum” in its beak, with the motto “‘United We Stand’”
inscribed below’ (1996: 92). During this period of uncertain union, the
twins were depicted as the incarnation of the political ideal of a unity
encompassing difference and plurality. Tellingly, Darin Strauss’s fic-
tional biography of Chang and Eng (2001) also highlights the parallels
between the brothers’ inescapable fraternity and the political tensions

of the newly-United States of America. Far from triggering battles for
supremacy, as in ancient myth, twins are here seen to embody the
solution to the rivalry and fratricide of civil war.
Further north, John Ralston Saul uses conjoined twins as an emblem-
atic image for his study of Canada at the end of the twentieth century,
Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997). In doing so he alludes to Jacques
Godbout’s novel Les Têtes à Papineau (1981): Charles-François Papineau
is the name (laden with references to Quebec history) given to con-
joined twins sharing a body, but with two heads, one anglophone, one
francophone, who debate the possibility of separation.3 Surgery takes
place but enables only one twin to survive: the anglophone Charles
F. Papineau, who writes that he is unable to complete the text because
he no longer understands French. Here the elimination of one twin
heralds not harmony but loss.
If twins pose a threat to the social order in ancient legend, these
allegories offer conjoined twins as a hopeful image of peaceful if some-
times difficult cohabitation. Curiously, in these tales, it is their dissim-
ilarity that is emphasised. And yet, unlike the mythic rulers, they are
not fraternal twins. Conjoined twins of necessity share identical genes,
and so it is significant that in invoking them to symbolise nationhood
it is not their sameness but their difference that is foregrounded.
The border between them
In contrast, differences are downplayed and sameness is emphasised in

the twins story most readily available for use in contemporary tales of
nations – that of the reconciliation of twins raised apart. Separated
early in life, living parallel but contrasting lives on opposite sides of a
border, such twins finally meet and rekindle a relationship across the
frontier. Here again, twins suggest the possibility of overcoming divi-
sions. The topos appears across genres and is easily transferred geo-
graphically. It can be used to sum up, in a few moments of news
footage, fifty years of India-Pakistan relations (as illustrated in the
introduction to this chapter) or to explore at length the legacy of
World War II, as we shall see. Although usually male, the twins may be
of either sex, in keeping with the plot (combatant male twins in
nations at war, for example) or with a tradition of gendered representa-
tions of the nation. They are almost never, however, of mixed gender,
for what remains constant is the need for, if not an identical pair, then
at least twins who are interchangeable in some way.
The documentary film Oskar and Jack (1997) recounts the life
stories of a pair of identical twins raised apart and reunited late in
life through the Minnesota twins project directed by Professor
Bouchard (see Chapter 5). If Oskar and Jack were considered the most
newsworthy of all Bouchard’s research subjects, it is due to their
potential to represent nations. In 1979, when their reunion took
place, newspapers (shown in the documentary) bore the headline
‘Twins! Nazi and Jew.’ Born in Trinidad to a Jewish father and
German mother, the twins were separated soon after birth in 1933
when their parents split up, Jack growing up a practising Jew in
Trinidad, Oskar a German in a family with strong Nazi sympathies.
Their first meeting, in their twenties, faltered over political differ-
ences and was marked by mistrust, but later in life, they arrive at
mutual understanding achieved through the sharing of their stories.
In the documentary, each twin tells of his childhood fear/fantasy
of meeting the other in combat during World War II.4
The topos of twins separated by a border is equally available for
fictional use. Like Oskar and Jack, Tessa de Loo’s novel De tweeling
(1993, The Twins, 2002) explores the different perspectives from which
twins separated in childhood experience Nazism. After the death of
their parents, Anna and Lotte are raised apart by different branches
of the family, Lotte in the Netherlands, where she becomes engaged to
a Dutch Jew, Anna in rural poverty in Germany, where she marries an
SS officer. Both lose their partners during the war. Some forty years
later, the two elderly women meet again by chance at a health resort.
Each recognises her own suffering during the war, but Lotte in par-
ticular resists reconciliation, believing that Anna was not merely a
victim of circumstance but was complicitous in inflicting the misery
endured by the Dutch. Only through the forced exchange of narratives
does each sister arrive at a grudging understanding of the hardship
experienced by her twin and by the nation she represents.
These twin tales echo historical novels and films of brothers at arms
on opposite sides (Confederate and Yankee, roundhead and cavalier,
loyalist and republican Irish brothers) in which brotherhood triumphs
over enmity and sameness is (re)discovered across difference. The topos
is clearly available for adaptation to a range of conflicts, and one can
equally imagine twin stories waiting to be told about Israeli and
Palestinian, Serbian and Croatian, North and South Korean, Iraqi
and American twins. If the story is somewhat predictable, the interest
lies in the allegorical detail, in the embedding of the twin tale in
specific national histories.
Although de Loo’s twins are not identical (Lotte’s weaker health is

the pretext for the sisters’ separation), the same premise of sameness
underlies all these stories.5 The use of twins raised apart as a trope for
life on two sides of a border depends for its force on the image of an
arbitrary separation creating difference where there was none: ‘there
but for the grace of God, go I.’ Only the luck of the draw seems to des-
ignate who will adopt which religion or political position, who will be
the victim and who the perpetrator. Oskar and Jack make this evident
as they focus on small discrepancies between them as babies that
might have led a parent to choose one twin over the other. Lotte’s con-
viction that she would have acted differently in her sister’s place loses
its certainty. Apparently irreconcilable differences are belied by the
shared heritage of the twins, and the peoples of warring nations
are mirrored in each other. Twins, then, offer the possibility of seeing
the life one might have lived, but for circumstances, here geographical
ones.6
A more ambiguous and innovative use of twins separated by a border
as a figure for national fissures occurs in Agota Kristof’s trilogy of
novels: The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie (first published 1986,
1988, 1991). It starts with a tale of twins evacuated to a village at the
frontier between East and West, as the iron curtain drops. One twin
manages to cross the border to the West. Inconsistencies multiply,
however, and successive narratives indicate that most of the events
recounted are fabrications, although the relentless, everyday cruelty,
the amoral acts of survival, vengeance and possessive love belie a truth
that goes beyond the circumstances of events. The tissue of lies leaves
the reader unclear, for much of the trilogy, as to whether there are in
fact twin brothers or whether one (but which one?) is an invention of
the other. The phantom twinship makes the trilogy hover between
classification as a tale of twins or a tale of doubles. Is there one?
Are there two? Is there a relation(ship) across the border, or merely the
illusion of one? Although there is an exchange of (multiple and
conflicting) narratives, this is no story of a celebration of brotherhood.
In a departure from the usual tale of the triumph of sameness over
difference, Kristof depicts unhealing wounds and insurmountable
obstacles to reconciliation.
Changelings
Although internal fissures in national identity may be represented by

twins raised apart – greedy gringo/warm-hearted hispanic in the film
comedy Steal Big Steal Little (1995), decadent bourgeois/bomb-throwing

revolutionary in the Hungarian art-film My Twentieth Century (1988)7 –
another common topos is that of babies swapped at birth, of change-
lings. Hospital error sees Etienne, in the film The Third Walker (1978),
brought up in a French-Canadian family rather than with his English-
speaking twin in the next village. Changelings are, however, more
often doubles, metaphorical rather than biological twins. Thus the
children of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) are boys born
at the same instant: midnight on 15 August 1947, the moment of birth
of India as an independent nation. Separated by class and religion,
they are immediately swapped in the cradles in a disruption of that
separation.
Midnight’s Children builds on an extensive narrative tradition of
twins/doubles of differing social standing who change places. Among
its more famous literary precursors are two of Mark Twain’s stories. In
The Prince and the Pauper (first published 1882), lookalike boys, each
envying the other, swap places and become trapped in the other’s role.
Each becomes wiser before the prince regains the palace and the
pauper returns to a somewhat improved position among the common-
ers. ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’ (first published 1894) adds race to the equa-
tion in its story of the cradle swap of the slave’s child and the master’s
heir (apparently half-brothers). The wickedness of the usurper shows
that he is unfit for any but the slave condition to which he is eventu-
ally returned when the true identity of the rightful heir is revealed. In
concluding by swapping characters back to their original stations,
Twain’s texts use the double ultimately to reaffirm the status quo. In
‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’ in particular, a similarity of appearance obscures
more profound social divisions. Nonetheless, in The Prince and the
Pauper, and indeed in the majority of more recent examples, such as
Martin Amis’s Success (1978), the ease of interchangeability indicates
an essential sameness concealed by superficial class differences. The
double therefore serves to question, sometimes discreetly, sometimes
quite plainly, the existence of social inequalities.
This latter perspective is the theme of the documentary Twins
in Black and White (1998), which recounts the experiences of sets of
twins with different skin colour. Just as skin colour varies among
brothers and sisters in ethnically mixed families, so fraternal twins can
be born with colouring different enough for one to be seen as black,
the other white in social situations. The film highlights the impact this
difference – literally skin-deep – has made on the twins’ lives and
on their relationship with each other. Here too, the emphasis is on the
circumstantial nature of social divisions, in contrast with the funda-

mental sameness evoked in our culture by the idea of twins, whether
identical or not.8
A double-take on identity
Twins raised apart across borders, changelings that cross class or

cultural barriers, the forced cohabitation of conjoined twins: these are,
then, the conventional modern patterns for telling national stories
through twin tales. Each in its own way proposes twinship as a way of
overcoming division, either through unity (conjoined twins) or resem-
blance (changelings and separated twins). Rather than representing the
source of strife, as in the foundation myths, twins now offer a readily
available image for the solution to strife, for peaceful coexistence.
Marie-Thérèse Humbert’s novel A l’autre bout de moi (literally At the
Other End of Me, 1979),9 follows a rather different path, whereby
the ideals of unity and resemblance, far from healing divisions, exacer-
bate tensions with tragic consequences. At the same time, the twin
viewpoints presented in the novel allow us to glimpse alternatives to
these ideals.
The twins in A l’autre bout de moi are depicted somewhat ambiguously:
are they similar or dissimilar? Are they the problem or the answer? Is
twinship an impediment to or a model for identity formation? Humbert
departs from the patterns sketched above in order to tell a tale of
Mauritian twins that doubles as a tale of national identity in crisis. And
in doing so, she reveals competing discourses of individual and cultural
identity. To write of the island of Mauritius and of its complex intereth-
nic relations, Humbert could have chosen to tell of pale twins brought
up separately in white and coloured families, or of Indian and Chinese
babies swapped in the cradle, or even perhaps of conjoined French- and
Creole-speaking twins of unequal strength and power.10 But she didn’t.
Neither, however, did she seek to tell a startlingly new story. On the con-
trary, she chose a classic twin tale: twins – here mixed race sisters –
growing up together and struggling to survive stagnation and rivalry.
‘The theme of adversary twins’ is evoked on the cover of the novel, situ-
ating it in a narrative tradition, and the topos is used to explore the
dividedness of a hybrid identity and the search for an identity of one’s
own. This search is first and foremost a personal one for the narrator,
Anne, but, as Shakuntala Boolell (1997) points out, the parallels between
Anne’s predicament and the situation of Mauritius are such that it can
be read as an allegory for a national quest for identity.
As we saw in Chapter 2, tradition dictates the death of one or both

twins as the dénouement to this story. And this is indeed what
happens: one twin must die before the other can accept and recognise
her own identity. Identity is an ambiguous term, paradoxically denot-
ing both oneness and twoness: the individuality of a single entity and
the identicalness of two.11 In the novel, twoness is sacrificed and syn-
thesised into oneness. Wholeness and indivisibility are sought at any
cost. A terrible price is paid to acquire an identity of one’s own. The
personal drama can be read simultaneously in national terms: it warns
us of the model of assimilation and synthesis into One – whether the
unified person or ‘one nation.’12
On the one hand, then, the novel serves as a cautionary tale. It
also, however, gestures towards an alternative model for the under-
standing of self and nation. Another discourse of subjectivity, only
half-articulated in the text, exposes common assumptions about the
relation between sameness and difference. It points to a less destructive
conception of identity – personal and Creole – and is the focus of
the analysis that follows. The problem of surviving sameness, raised at
the interpersonal level in Chapter 2, is here posed on a national scale.
Identity and the identical: Humbert’s A l’autre bout de moi
The undecidability between the twoness and the oneness of identity –

between the identical and the individual, the split and the whole –
characterises the figure of the double and is the pivot on which
Humbert’s A l’autre bout de moi turns. To say that Anne Morin, the nar-
rator of A l’autre bout de moi, is haunted by a double would not be
strictly correct. Rather, her story is that of being herself relegated to the
role of the double. She sees herself as the mere shadow of her vivacious
twin sister, Nadège, and without an identity to call her own. In fact she
is doubly positioned as the double: not only is she the pale imitation
of her sister, but she belongs to a group who are the shadow of white
society, a dark imitation. Neither black, nor Indian, nor Chinese, her
family are counted among the ‘almost-whites-but-not-quite’ (Humbert,
1979: 22), a barely classifiable group with no clear identity of their
own, who ape the whites without hope of being fully accepted by
them.
Resemblance is thus the nub of Anne’s problem. Anne sees iden-
tity in terms of oneness threatened by twoness and tells the story of
her attempt to extricate herself from her role as shadow and arrive at
an individual identity of her own. In order to escape both from her
sister and from her off-white skin, she becomes prim and proper, an
assiduous churchgoer, and seeks to marry the son of a white bour-
geois family. The colourful Nadège, meanwhile, keeps company
with darker-skinned Mauritians – whether black, Creole, Indian or
Chinese – and represents everything that Anne rejects in herself.
Nadège has a secret Indian lover, Aunauth, who struggles to increase
the political power of the non-white community. When Nadège
falls pregnant, Anne unleashes her hatred, in which she finally
recognises the part of self-hatred. To mollify her twin, Nadège has a
backyard abortion and dies as a result. Only then does Anne accept
the other side of herself, her Creole heritage, represented by her
sister. Although she is traumatised by the death of Nadège, it is only
through the elimination of her twin that she manages to synthesise
the two halves into one whole. And then she not only accepts her
skin colour, but speaks with Nadège’s voice, even takes Nadège’s
place beside Aunauth. Anne’s solution is to live Nadège’s life as her
own, to become the original of which she had felt herself to be the
copy. The threat of the double is suppressed and the twins become
one: shadow and original coincide.13
Anne’s narration is not, however, seamless, and if we resist the temp-
tation to construct its coherence, if we refuse to read the narration in
the image of the conception of identity as wholeness that it explicitly
promotes, then we find it undermined by traces of more sophisticated
discourses of identity. Anne relates the remarks of other characters, in
particular Nadège and Aunauth, and she herself makes occasional
observations that sit uncomfortably with her project of undivided self-
hood. These moments enable us to put pressure on the narration, to
read it against the grain. They fracture the telling, and if we position
our reading in and across the fissures, we find an alternative under-
standing of identity, less deadly, produced by but repressed within the
text.14
Anne’s narration hinges on her reading of her resemblance with her
sister. She sees herself as an exact copy of Nadège, but a carbon copy, a
lacklustre mirror image, a poor quality photo (121), perfectly similar …
but lifeless:
although our faces with their regular features, were trait for trait
almost perfectly alike, Nadège always had a sort of special radiance
you couldn’t explain. It was about me that people exclaimed,
‘My God, you look so much like your sister!’ Never the other way
round. (35)
She speaks of ‘the dull shadow that was me’ (419), as if she has no self
but is merely a reflection. This portrait of the twins, trapped in a mir-
roring relationship, leads inexorably to Nadège’s death. And yet, right
from the beginning, little clues appear that allow us to doubt Anne’s
assessment of her predicament and to start to unhinge her reading. Are
the twins really identical at all? At their birth, the midwife declared
that they were fraternal twins, but Anne dismisses her opinion: ‘our
resemblance was so great that people generally maintained that she’d
made a mistake’ (Humbert, 1979: 35). But who are these ‘people’?
Not their father, for whom Anne resembles her mother (370). Certainly
not Nadège, for when their cousin Arnaud fatuously pretends to
confuse them to amuse his audience, she exclaims: ‘Blockhead! has
anyone ever mixed us up before?’ (386). The answer to this rhetorical
question is, of course, that someone has confused them: Anne herself
has been having trouble distinguishing them all along. But she is
perhaps alone in this. Aunauth, serial lover of the twins, spells it out
most clearly: ‘whatever you thought, you’re not like Nadège. […] really
Anne, even physically, you never resembled Nadège more than a sister
who looks like another sister. As for me, I never saw you as identical’
(368).
Aunauth’s interpretation cuts across Anne’s narration. It is an isol-
ated point of rupture in a story that continues right up until the final
paragraphs to speak of similarity: ‘my profile […] so like Nadège’s’
(462). As such it provides an opportunity for the reader to consolidate
any doubts about the narration and a position from which to resist the
telling. The passage jostles the narration in more ways than one. It is
one of only half a dozen moments in the novel where the enunciation
of the text is made explicit, and we glean some details of Anne’s situ-
ation in the present of her writing. At the outset, she and her partner
have found refuge in exile in the suburbs of Paris (11–14, 100), but
forced to confront the past through the chance viewing of a snippet of
television and through the flow of writing it unleashes, Anne feels
the need to return to her birthplace, and narrates the final third of the
novel from Mauritius (315–463). But it is only when Anne quotes his
refutation of the idea of her resemblance to her sister that we realise
that Aunauth is the man at her side throughout the telling, and that
she has taken her sister’s lover, her sister’s place. This is therefore a
passage of revelations, not the least of which is that the twins are far
from identical in eyes other than Anne’s.
Anne’s first reaction to Aunauth’s statement is to want to protest.
Then she realises that his opinion is in fact ‘redemptive’ in requiring
Anne to reconceive her identity such that it is not dependent on her

sister’s (368), so she refrains from appealing against his judgement.
She does not however integrate its consequences into her narrative.
She never refers to it again and simply reverts to reiterating her belief
in her indistinguishability from her twin (seeing the resemblance as
increasingly pronounced, seeing Nadège when she passes the mirror,
450). Following Aunauth’s statement, Anne continues to relate her
story with scant reference to her present situation – after another short
exchange with Aunauth (372) there is but a fleeting comment (389) –
and without allowing his insight to colour her telling. His words
remain an unresolved challenge to the coherence of Anne’s story.
Why does Anne insist on absolute resemblance, whereas we might
interpret her relation with her twin as a form of identification? If she
insists on her similarity to her sister, it is because the premise of same-
ness is her only way of accounting for her perceived lack of identity
both personal (she is the copy of her sister) and cultural (she is one of
the ‘almost-whites’ who mimic the white bourgeois community, 39).
This impression of lack is in turn dependent upon a certain conception
of identity: identity as centred, whole, circumscribed and independent
– in other words, identity as something like an island.15 Unfortunately
it seems that the island must needs be a desert island before Anne can
claim it as her own.
Anne sees Nadège as occupying a place ‘at the centre of a mysterious
circle that set her apart’ (36) and seeks a similar space for herself where
she can stand alone. She wants to be at the centre of her own island,
with a centred self, rather than being at one end of a shared space. To
achieve this, she must first leave Nadège’s magic circle. Separating from
her sister becomes her primary aim (367, 419). Anne is locked into a
view of the self whereby shared space and mirrored identity exclude
selfhood. And all she manages to occupy is ‘a very small space […]. Just
my size’ (193).
Although Anne regards Nadège as standing alone in the centre of her
own circle, Nadège does not seem to share this view, and Anne
manages to let slip through her narration reports of Nadège’s less
destructive understanding of identity. A comparison of the sisters’
remarks about mirrors is instructive. We have already mentioned that
Anne sees herself as a dull mirror image. As she stands before the
looking-glass, she believes Nadège to be substantial enough to warrant
reflection, whereas her own image eludes her: ‘When I look at myself
in the mirror, it’s you I see’ (121). In fact, she believes that she has no
reflection of her own, because she is a reflection, that there is nothing
of her to reflect but a mere play of light and shade. Nadège, on the
other hand, less anxious about identity, has a very different attitude
towards mirrors and reflections:
She never ever looked at herself anywhere but in the eyes of others,
distracted by these chance mirrors like a child with the changing
colours of a prism, perpetually playing at creating new shades, in
turn intrigued, captivated, indignant or charmed by these external
reflections, and thus constantly wandering further from herself.
There’s nothing less imaginative and less true than a mirror! she
would declare scornfully. (419)
While Anne peers in vain into the mirror, waiting for her Self to
appear, Nadège looks at herself and even for herself in the gaze of
the other. Unlike Anne, she is not threatened by seeing herself as a
reflection; on the contrary, she rejoices in it. For when she looks at
herself in others’ eyes, she sees not a simple copy, but rather a shim-
mering and ever-changing image, coloured by myriad refractions.
Nadège’s practice takes her away from any supposed centre. Her iden-
tity – both personal and Creole – is not fixed or anchored, but based on
identification with multiple images. It is not constituted by a stable
centre but by a set of relations tending outwards. Nadège is drawn out
from herself toward her reflections, and importantly experiences no
loss of self in the process.
This is the alternative to Anne’s island view of identity: Nadège sees
her identity – and one could make the case for Creole identity more
generally – as based on relation. This relational view – identity as an
open set of identifications, of relations between – coincides with the
models being elaborated in psychoanalytical stories of identity devel-
opment around the time of the novel’s publication. According to
Lacan, as toddlers we accede to a position as subject by assuming dou-
bleness, by identifying the mirror image as ‘me’ (1977). Thus, having
an identity to call one’s own requires in the first instance an invest-
ment in a specular image – an identification. But identity is not simply
acquired once and for all in a single step, and Julia Kristeva’s work
extends the importance of identificatory mechanisms in the constitu-
tion – and continuous renewal – of the self. Well before the mirror
stage, she sees the imaginary mobilising ‘a whole array of identifica-
tions’ (1995: 103) for the developing subject, giving rise to ‘a kaleido-
scope of ego images that build the foundation for the subject of
enunciation’ (104).16 From this period onwards, she argues, the life
of the psyche depends on it remaining open to identifications. To cease

this process of projection and investment of the self in the other is to
risk stagnation and moribundity (1987: 15). To this way of thinking
then, multiple images of the self mirrored in the other are not threats
to identity but constantly constitute it. It is in the course of identifying
with them that we acquire identity.
The prismatic image Nadège has of herself is multi-coloured rather
than imitation white. Nadège finds herself reflected in – and projects
her own likeness on to – people of all colours. She is perfectly capable
of passing between cultures – between the Chinese shopkeeper’s yard
and the Hindu festivals of the village, for instance. And if she sees
herself in the eyes of whites too, unlike Anne she also sees them in
herself, mirrors them back with a tinge of colour. When the white girls
at school ask if she is one of them, so as to know whether they should
play with her, Nadège replies, ‘We aren’t white, but neither are you:
someone told me there was black blood in your family’ (Humbert,
1979: 94). She is able to reject the role of shadow for the almost-whites
and to see whites and creoles as doubles of each other. She perceives
the paradox that the place and the supposed purity of white society
depend for their existence on a relation (of exclusion) to the would-
be-whites. In other words she accepts the relational and mirroring
nature of the various identities on the island of Mauritius. She under-
stands that no community carves out a place for itself other than
through mechanisms of identification and exclusion.
Nadège, then, does not confuse likeness with a constricting same-
ness. She seems to comprehend that likeness – whether between indi-
viduals or groups – rather than undermining identity, is the very basis
of it, and that identification with others, far from being an impedi-
ment to identity, is the means of achieving it. Although she eschews
the conventional looking-glass, she echoes Lacan in appreciating the
role of the mirror in the formation of identity. Her use of other people
as mirrors involves not just reflection, but also projection of and
identification with images. Nadège’s child-like amusement before her
animate mirrors reminds us of the toddler who learns to recognise
himself as other, as a reflected image, in order to achieve a sense of
self.17 This is what Anne cannot see: resemblance as a projected (rather
than reflected) image, identicalness as a form of identification. Not
having Anne’s investment in sameness, Nadège is enlivened by a con-
stantly othered image (a capricious reflection) requiring her continu-
ally to redefine herself. Her identity is constructed through successive
identifications – it’s all done with mirrors. As such, it is not menaced
but rather constituted by doubleness.
It is worth remembering that for Lacan’s toddler, the jubilatory

moment of recognition, when he assumes the mirror image as his own,
is the first instance in which he has a sense of his separateness as a
subject. Primarily this is a question of separation from the mother. But
what happens when that mirror image is not recognised for what it is,
is mistaken for another? It is interesting to ponder the case of identical
twins where the likelihood is that the mirror image will be taken to be
the twin rather than the self. Anne, it seems, has never been able to
assume her mirror image as her own, and consequently has never had
a sense of self. As for separateness, Anne’s narration gives expression to
her tortured, simultaneous identifications with and rejections of her
mother, characteristic of the failure to tear oneself away from the
mother-child dyad. But Anne also seems mired in another dyad, just as
inextricable as the mother-child one, for she is unable to separate from
her womb-mate, her twin sister.
Nadège, on the other hand, clearly made the break and made
these relationships workable long ago. Indeed, so well has she learnt
the lessons of the mirror that she is impatient with the idea of simple
duplication and has moved on from the conventional looking-glass
when seeking confirmation of her sense of self, which she now finds in
less predictable identifications.
Nadège knows her face as her own, because it is reflected in other
faces. Meanwhile Anne considers her face not her own because it is too
much like Nadège’s. It is only when her sister becomes faceless, so to
speak, that Anne can possess her own face. When Nadège reveals her
pregnancy, Anne slaps her violently, leaving her dazed, stupefied.
Triumphantly, Anne observes: ‘before this expressionless mask, I finally
had a face’ (Humbert, 1979: 427). When Anne sees her own reflection,
she feels she is a reflection. Only when she has no reflection – in front
of a blank face – does she finally believe that she has any substance.18
The tension between the twoness and oneness of identity is never
resolved in Anne’s narration. They remain incompatible. Her articula-
tion of the identity problem is always in terms of doubleness, of the
mirror that blurs rather than clarifying her image. When she remin-
isces, she realises that she never sees herself in the past: ‘I see us, a
plural me, or perhaps a plural Nadège, […] like a trick photo, a double
click on the same exposure. I see myself in duplicate, I see us in duplic-
ate, […] – ‘I’ only exist as a couple’ (75). Anne focuses on her resem-
blance to Nadège as the source of her difficulties, however it is not as if
she is alone in being perceived as double. In fact, far from being pecu-
liar to her by virtue of her twinship, duality appears to be a general
condition in the novel. Nadège is the image of her father: ‘his female
double’ (223). Paul Roux, Nadège’s suitor, seems to split in two when
in conversation, now loquacious, now reticent (285). Suzanne, the
Chinese shopkeeper’s wife, gives the impression of being ‘a poorly
dubbed actress, as if the voice and gaze didn’t match’ (161). And her
husband, Ah-Ling, is no more the unified subject than she is, for he
seems a different person according to whether he is serving blacks,
Indians, whites, mulattos (68). Anne complains of her lack of unity
and of seeing herself as double, and yet other characters do not simply
coincide with themselves. In fact, Anne could say that she sees them in
duplicate. They, however, seem unperturbed by their status as doubles
and/or fragmented subjects.
Anne relates these impressions but does not relate them to herself.
Her predicament – ‘«je» n’existons qu’en tant que couple’ (‘“I” only exist
as a couple,’ 75)19 – appears as singular to her as her self seems duplic-
ate. Nevertheless, what Anne perceives as her dilemma can be recast as
its solution if we follow Nadège’s model of identity. If identity is not a
solitary state but is based on relation, then doubleness becomes
the answer to Anne’s problem, for twoness (the specular relation)
makes it possible to assume oneness (identity through identification).
Twoness and oneness cease to be mutually exclusive.
Doubleness presents a solution too to Anne’s supposed lack of cul-
tural identity, for if Creole appears to be an in-between identity, in fact
none of the island’s cultures are clearly distinct, not even the insular
white community. From this perspective, Creole identity ceases to be
merely off-white. Creole and white become doubles of each other and,
like Ah-Ling, mirror in turn the gamut of Mauritian cultures.
Nowhere land
Parallelling the contrast between the island view and the relational
conception of identity is a tension between alternative spatial repres-
entations of twinship. Both a womb and a nowhere land (‘pays de nulle
part’ 267, 339) are invoked to situate Anne’s relation with her sister.
They are not contrasted in the novel but coexist in Anne’s discourse as
if they were coherent with each other. If, however, we tease out the
implications of each space, it becomes clear that the two have vastly
different consequences for the continued viability of the twinship. The
tragic events of the novel’s dénouement seem to follow the inevitable
logic of the womb metaphor, but uncoupling the images reveals a less
destructive interpretation – available to Anne but ignored – of the twin
relation and, by extension, of the twins’ cultural identity.
Like the island of Mauritius, lapped and caressed by the swell of the
sea, the twins’ childhood was as if bathed in warm, gentle waters that
wrapped around them like a cloak (72). But as in all amniotic idylls,
this dark Eden carries the threat of expulsion from the womb. In
Anne’s dream,
The water starts to gurgle and eddy, […] come back to me! warm
water, gentle water, so like the hot tears that clad my first sorrows;
but no, the water keeps receding, leaving a great emptiness around
me, in me; nothing remains of me but a long shudder and all I can
do is fall, […]. And then comes the light, a terrible light that strips
me bare and rends me, […] there is no longer peace, nor warmth,
where am I then Nadège? (72–3)
The breaking of the waters heralds the fall from grace into the expo-
sure of daylight. But the dread inspired by birth is in this case less
an anxiety about separation from the maternal body than a fear of sep-
aration from the sister beside her in the womb. In the dream, Nadège
reassures Anne: ‘You are next to me’ (73).
Anne is thus torn between antithetical desires. On the one hand, she
seeks to flee her sister and find her own space, to flee her colour and
join the white elite. On the other hand, to do so requires that Anne
tear open the comforting, aquatic envelope of her shared embryonic
identity. Aunauth is again the sole character to articulate the con-
tradiction: ‘Despite all your efforts to the contrary, you dreamed
obscurely of finishing the incomplete design, of forming a single entity
with Nadège’ (368). The tug-of-war is evident in the violence needed
for Anne finally to break away.
There are several uterine spaces shared by the twins in the novel. The
reassuring confines of Ah-Ling’s shop enclose one such space. A sensu-
ous nook of smells and tastes and colours, it ‘shielded’ and ‘nourished’
their childhood (62). In Anne’s dream it cradles them like ‘a womb in
the sea’ (73). At the novel’s conclusion, however, its roof is ripped
open in a hurricane. For the womb is not for indefinite sojourn or its
cocoon becomes constrictive, its waters stagnant, its silence deathly.
Built on the ruins of an old cemetery, the Morin family’s dilapidated
home with its dark stillness is such a womb/tomb: the house that ‘sur-
rounded our childhood with its walls of rotten wood’ (15) is seen as ‘a
sort of stronghold where silence would come and condense’ (17), and
where ‘everything would slowly die in the sultry closeness’ (205). As we
saw in Chapter 2, such images are typical of novelistic representations
of the twin relation as a shared sphere of deathly silence and heavy

plenitude, timeless and immobile like an unbroken amniotic sac. And
if the twin relation is conceived as quasi-uterine containment, then
ultimately the only alternative to a stillborn future is the rupture of the
sac.
Anne, who sees her twinship in this womb-like way, is drawn as if by
the force of the metaphor towards rupture. And in her attack on
Nadège, she achieves it decisively. The confrontation takes place in the
village of Cassis, whose very name whispers repeatedly to Anne of
breaking (casser, 383), and the rift between the siblings is like a birth
for Anne, who takes her first searing lung-full of unpaired existence:
‘And this sudden breaking in me, this intense burning sensation, as if,
for the first time, my lungs filled with air’ (383). The breach occurs
when Nadège reveals her pregnancy and Anne realises what the birth
of a brown baby will mean for her plans for marriage into the white
bourgeois community. Anne slaps her face with full force and screams
at her in a frenzy, airing her broken dreams and bitterness, and
towards the end of her tirade goes as far as wishing for the death of the
foetus: ‘qu’il crève,’ she cries, ‘I hope he dies’ (428). As a direct result,
Nadège aborts. Crever: to burst, to die. Along with the twinship,
another sac is punctured. But Anne doesn’t stop there. Her peroration –
‘Foetus! Horrible foetus! Die!’ (428) – is directed not towards Nadège’s
baby but aimed quite clearly at Nadège herself, huddled on the sand in
a foetal pose, ‘her head hidden in her folded arms, her legs tucked
under her’ (428). Sadly, Nadège does just that. Skewered by the knit-
ting needle, she is aborted as much as her baby. Anne’s words reveal
her conception of the twinship as an overcrowded uterus. If abortion is
the elimination of a body colonising the womb, in this case the foreign
body is that of the twin. Twinship, the baby and Nadège – all three
perish. And Anne is born, but born of Nadège’s death.
Inherent in the idealised space of the womb is, then, the threat of
imminent rupture. The womb, however, represents for Anne not only
the terrain of the twinship, torn between white and coloured visions of
its destiny. The island of Mauritius itself, the warm, wet cradle of the
twins is portrayed as a circumscribed amniotic space from which Anne
is ultimately expelled. Fractured like the twinship along colour lines, in
the aftermath of Nadège’s death and Aunauth’s implication in the
tragedy it is rent by political tensions, and Anne and Aunauth have
little option but to abandon the island.
There is, however, another representation in the novel of the space
shared by the twins. It relies on a metaphor of land or country and
thus conjures up the possibility of extrapolation to a less constraining

model for cultural affiliation. Anne describes a psychical space, another
part of herself that is not easily located or accessible, but hovers
à l’autre bout de moi, at the other end of herself. She writes of a pays de
nulle part, a nowhere land to which she is transported by music, death
and suffering, and which links her to her mother, her sister and her
childhood: ‘When I’m hurting I always think I’m in nowhere land, at
the other end of me, far, far away, where the waves pound continually
and drag me away from my body’ (339). This unfathomable space of
otherness within herself is less amniotic than semiotic, in the Kristevan
sense of the word. Kristeva’s semiotic is a modality where feeling rather
than thinking prevails, where waves of sensation wash over the body
in an infinitely repeatable rhythm of separation and fusion. Governed
not by reason but by the rhythm of bodily drives, it harks back to a
time before the emergence of the thinking and speaking subject, a time
of symbiosis with the mother (and quite possibly with a twin).
Unlocatable, inaccessible to the intellect, and inadequately described
by language, the semiotic can however be accessed by the social/speak-
ing/reasoning subject through aesthetic, emotional and sensual experi-
ence (Kristeva, 1984: 25–30). Thus listening to Rachmaninov offers
Anne a fleeting chance to ‘to leave, to go far away, to the Nowhere
Land we used to play at visiting in our childhood, but above all, to
be assured of returning’ (Humbert, 1979: 267–8). And it is in this
nowhere space at the furthest reaches of herself that Anne connects
with her sister: ‘at the other end of me, the only zone where I could
ever meet her’ (428).
Although Kristeva uses Plato’s term of the chora (an amorphous,
nourishing, maternal receptacle) to describe the pre-linguistic func-
tioning of the semiotic, there is an important difference between her
conception of the semiotic and the womb-like spaces that harbour
the twin relation elsewhere in Anne’s narration. In Kristeva’s theory,
the split between the semiotic and symbolic is in no way definitive. It
is not a matter of choosing between two discrete modalities, of moving
from darkness into light. The symbolic (social structures, language,
reason, identity) needs to be constantly renewed by the eruption of
semiotic energy. And having been swept away in a semiotic tumult
of music, colour, ecstasy or pain, the subject must be able to regain the
possibility of intelligible speech and the relative stability afforded
by the symbolic. As Anne puts it, she must be assured of her return.
There is thus an ongoing dialectical relation between the semiotic and
the symbolic rather than the destruction and abandonment of one
mode in favour of the other (cf. de Nooy, 1998: 29–43). It is this aspect
of the ‘nowhere land,’ the fact that it need not be relinquished for
Anne to retain her social identity, that sets it apart from the amniotic
spaces in the novel.
If I insist on this difference between semiotic and amniotic representa-
tions of twin-spaces in the novel, it is because the former holds out some
hope of a continued existence for the twin relation (and indeed for the
twin), whereas the very image of the latter invites rupture. The semiotic
nowhere land at the other end of the self is an alternative representation
of twin space readable in Anne’s narration. Less clearly circumscribed
than the island of identity, its limits less constraining than the womb, it
allows for a to-ing and fro-ing between the sensual and the social,
between drifting and anchorage, between the dissolution and reconstitu-
tion of the self, and allows therefore for mobility between cultural iden-
tities. Indeed identity becomes defined by movement rather than place.
And if the nowhere land represents an otherness within, it cannot be
abandoned. In another dream, Anne hears Nadège try to convince her of
this lesson. Nadège calls out to her ‘sister sitting at the other end of me,
so lost and so near’: ‘There is no elsewhere. […] We are already so far
away when we want to embrace, solitary islands, drifting toward the
receding horizon of our desire’ (266). There is nowhere to escape to, she
intimates, away from Mauritius, away from our relationship. Exile is
doomed. We are already enough like islands without trying to isolate
ourselves further. Reaching out is what is important. Once again, the dis-
course ascribed to Nadège is one of being-as-relation rather than iden-
tity-as-island. We can see that the two definitions of identity (as island,
as relation) and the two spatial representations of twinship (womb and
nowhere land) work in tandem to reinforce the same contrast between
understandings of selfhood and cultural identity (self-contained or rela-
tional). Now this is Anne’s dream, not a reported conversation, so the
words supposedly from Nadège’s lips are in fact bubbling up from that
other region of herself, from the nowhere land. Will she heed them?
Will she make them hers? The words reach her ‘from a land too remote’
(266): they are too foreign to be integrated into her world view. They
remain ‘sans suite’ (266) in both senses of the expression: disjointed and
without impact or follow-up. It is only later – too late – when Nadège’s
voice has become her own (12), that she understands something of this
discourse.
The realisation begins when Anne strikes Nadège with her diatribe
and realises that ‘the woman at my feet that I was staring at in atro-
cious, savage satisfaction, was myself’ (428). Anne is forced to confront
the fact that what she rejects – Nadège’s colour, culture and desires – is
integral to herself and hence inescapable. It is Anne’s self-hatred that
causes Nadège’s death. When she later analyses her behaviour, she
admits: ‘Perhaps I was also rebelling against myself, a certain part
of myself’ (426). She is finally able to identify with that other part of
herself, the foreignness within that she projected on to Nadège and
thus kept so long at bay. She articulates her discovery – ‘I am now
convinced that there is no shadow behind us that is not our own
shadow, no ghost within us that is not in our image.’ (153) – and reit-
erates it, highlighting it as the major lesson she has learnt from
the tragedy: ‘To be separate from her, to be, at any price, that’s what I
wanted. I didn’t yet realise that what that made me renounce, because
it was too like me, was often the most authentic part of myself’ (419).
This is not however the sole lesson she learns. When she strikes
Nadège, she not only sees that her twin represents a part of herself but
also realises that separating from her sister is no guarantee of an inde-
pendent identity. For her show of anger and disgust is made possible
through the intervention of another figure: ‘at the moment when I’m
about to shout my disgust at Nadège, that warm look settles on me,
Mother’s gaze, which merges into mine’ (425–6). Her only means of
breaking free of Nadège is to identify with her mother, the woman she
struggled to repudiate: ‘Yes Father, I finally have my identity. You
remember, you said it yourself one afternoon: you are of your mother’s
breed!’ (425). Thus when Anne finally manages to achieve her ‘own’
identity, it is not independent of the play of mirrors, of identifications
and attachments. It is not singular, separate and self-sufficient. In fact
it is no less double than before.
In this one crucial episode, Anne accepts the part of both Nadège
and her mother in herself. The extent to which she revises her under-
standing of identity in order to do so, however, seems to be minimal.
We see this in the aftermath of a further moment of self-recognition
that occurs beside her father’s deathbed. Anne is struck by the revela-
tion that her antagonism towards her sister was in fact rivalry for her
father’s love (454).20 The fantasmatic solution to the competition – a
fantasy that brings Anne a sense of peace – is to take Nadège’s place
and to be embraced by their dying father while he calls her by both
names, Anne and Nadège. In other words, the solution is a synthesis of
the sisters. And this imagined synthesis is then realised by Anne as she
takes on aspects of Nadège’s life.
Anne believes that she has learnt, but in fact she hasn’t learnt so
very much. She has learnt to accept those parts of herself that she once
rejected and projected on to Nadège, but she has not learnt that this
was possible without eliminating her sister. She has learnt to recognise
her resemblance with her mother and her love for her father, but they
both had to die for her to attain this understanding. Anne cannot
accept her own identifications as a basis for identity until the objects of
identification are out of the way. Once she thought of herself as merely
a reflection of others. If she finally achieves a sense of self, it is in no
small measure because those she mirrors have gone. It is as if her entire
family has to perish before she can synthesise their attributes into an
identity she can call her own. The island view of identity as whole and
separate prevails.
In the cataclysmic conclusion to the story, a cyclone ravages the
area, uprooting the olive tree that shaded their house and tearing
the roof from Ah-Ling’s shop. With its ‘eviscerated carcass’ (461), it is
as if the shop’s belly has been torn open. The gutting of their former
shelter, their ‘womb in the sea’ (73) means that the rupture of uterine
spaces is complete. Anne emerges whole and new from the destruction
of her family circle.
Although it cuts a swathe through the cane fields, the gale does not
sweep away previous habits of thought. Anne’s reaction to the shop’s
demise is to imagine that it will regrow just as it was (461–2) and in the
meantime to look for a substitute, ‘another refuge my size’ (458).
Ultimately such a refuge is exactly what she finds, a nest just her
size and shape: the hollow space left by the disappearance of her
twin. Anne glides into Nadège’s silhouette in Aunauth’s doorway, fills
Nadège’s shelf with her own things, occupies Nadège’s place in
Aunauth’s bed, takes over her voice. She slips into Nadège’s identity as
if it were a discrete, enclosed space, a hollow that she no longer has to
share with another, for her twin has been incorporated into herself.
Anne and Aunauth escape to Paris, only for Anne to learn that there
is no escape, no elsewhere. Finally, then, she understands Nadège’s
words and feels able to return to Mauritius. She now accepts her Creole
inheritance and her ties to her birthplace. But her mother, father and
sister are all dead. If she is finally able to live contentedly in Mauritius
it is perhaps because she has the island to herself.
Anne’s search for self is thus satisfied, but at great cost. Unable to
accept an identity defined by doubleness, she pursues individuality
with singular determination. Inevitably she must suffer the loss that
unitary selfhood demands – the loss of her double, her identical twin.
Nadège’s vision of identity – a way of seeing oneself in the eyes of
others and in constant kaleidoscopic transformation – is glimpsed but
is too volatile to constitute the foundations of selfhood for Anne.
Island homes
The dynamics of the twinship portrayed in Humbert’s novel reflect

some of the cultural tensions dividing the island of Mauritius. Parallel
with Anne’s search for personal selfhood is her search for cultural
identity. As a member of an in-between group perceived to have no
identity of its own, labelled ‘almost-white’ rather than Creole in
the text, Anne’s options appear to be limited to fusing or breaking
with those she shadows, to joining white society (or another clearly
identifiable group) or leaving the island.
However, the alternative discourse of identity associated in the novel
with the character of Nadège translates into a third option: a more
strategic adoption of identity (cf. Spivak, 1987: 205), based on shifting
identifications rather than on an insistence on sameness, on common
traits. This amounts to an understanding and acceptance of Creole
identity as in-betweenness rather than unity, as an identity in motion
rather than a definable entity occupying a designated cultural space.
Humbert’s novel thus serves as a parable, not only for Mauritius,
but more generally for hybrid and diasporic cultures in search of iden-
tity. In telling of twins trapped in a mirroring relationship rather than
of twins separated by a border and then reunited, Humbert avoids
the usual twin topos chosen for parables of national division and
substitutes a topos that, although equally familiar, is not normally
used in this way. The effect is a tragic dénouement, virtually imposed
from the outset by the positioning of the novel as a variation on
the ‘theme of adversary twins.’ Countless retellings of the story of
death-by-sameness-and-rivalry make Nadège’s fate inevitable.
What, then, might we learn from this parable? Anne lives to regret,
and to value what she has lost, but these lessons are a lament, not a
blueprint for avoiding her errors. Reading against Anne’s narration,
however, offers a glimmer of hope. If she were to examine more
carefully her impressions of Nadège’s sense of self, if she could main-
tain the connection with the nowhere space she senses as the real
space of twinship, perhaps she could relinquish her ideal of self-
contained selfhood and the concomitant ideal of clearly-defined eth-
nicity. Perhaps she – and indeed other island people (I refer to my
own country) in search of identity – could see that it need not be a
question of finding an isolated and clearly distinguishable cultural self,
of eliminating in-betweenness, or of synthesising otherness into a
coherent whole. Rather identity might be understood as a way of see-
ing oneself in others, a way of living doubleness. Then, instead of
seeking a snug, smug place just our size, we could look for identity in
multiple, shimmering images that reveal us to be in constant kaleido-

scopic transformation, and in relations of identification that take us
outside of ourselves. Rather than having an island to ourselves, rather
than being an island unto ourselves, we might marvel at the changing
shoreline, and at what the waves bring to change us.
The uses of twins to represent fissures in national or cultural identity
reveal understandings of the causes of and remedies for tensions and
conflict among peoples. Tales of rival twin rulers in ancient legend
affirmed the necessity for undivided power to unite a nation, while in
modern times allegories of conjoined twins suggest that cohabitation,
however uncomfortable, is a divided nation’s best chance for survival
and prosperity. Changelings that cross class barriers and twins separ-
ated by skin colour or national frontiers illustrate the arbitrariness of
social and geographical dividing lines and make the case that what the
two share outweighs their differences.
Twins can also, however, be used to make more subtle arguments
about cultural and national identity that go beyond the forging of
unity across division, the discovery of sameness across difference, the
triumph of our common humanity. Through their problematic rela-
tionship, the twins of Humbert’s novel demonstrate the pitfalls of the
celebration of sameness and unity and offer a vision of cultural belong-
ing defined not by bonds of flesh or blood but by the play of light
across a face, not by finding common ground but by continually
moving between.
7
Twins as Doubtful Doubles:
Postmodern Identity, Irony and
Invention
Once more with feeling
Umberto Eco identifies as postmodern the need to acknowledge the

repetition of past utterances, of familiar plots:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very

cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, ‘I love you
madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he
knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.
Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it,
I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence,
having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he
will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that
he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. (1985: 67)
Like declarations of love, tales of twins are seen to frequent ‘low’ genres
and employ hackneyed formulae. Already in 1949, Tymms could write
that ‘doubles are among the more facile, and less reputable devices in
fiction’ (1949: 15). This judgement has dogged the double and is echoed
by Rogers, Coates and Herdman, as they lament the twentieth-century
slide of the figure into banality and triviality (see Chapter 1). If any-
thing, doubles in the form of identical twins have come to command
even less respect through their proliferation in popular film genres, chil-
dren’s literature and supermarket romances. Eco’s solution of ironic
quotation is one way in which postmodern twin tales can ‘accept the
challenge of the past, of the already said,’ (1985: 67) and yet – as with a
lover’s declaration – the effects of the quotation are far from contained
by the irony of purpose.
137
This chapter focuses on two instances of the ironic citation of

doubles and twins, two ways of confronting the problem of triteness.
The first is examined only briefly, in order to devote attention to its
legacy, both in prose and on film. Vladimir Nabokov’s 1965 novel
Despair mocks literary uses of the double at the same time as it employs
them. It also, however, marks a turning point in the representation of
the double. With the benefit of hindsight, Nabokov’s joke can be seen
to herald the emergence of a distinctly postmodern discourse of the
double, explored in various genres in ways specific to those genres.
Despair thus represents a moment of newness as much as a reckoning
with the past. The second text is Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), a twin
film that functions as a mise-en-abyme of this process of repetition
and renewal, of the tension between tradition and novelty, and high-
lights the extent to which these issues need to be addressed as ques-
tions of genre. In its use of twins, the film explicitly engages with the
major questions of this book, asking what is entailed in retelling a
familiar tale, and how it can be put to new purposes.
The undoing of the double: Nabokov’s Despair
When is a double not a double, and who is in a position to tell?

Certainly not the story-teller in the case of Despair. Nabokov’s novel is
the tale of a doubtful double, a double that isn’t one. From the
opening pages, its narrator, writer Hermann Karlovitch, reveals himself
to be both self-deluding and a compulsive liar. He recounts his meeting
with a tramp, Felix Wohlfahrt – a happy traveller in both name and
nature. In Felix, Hermann sees his own spitting image, and he proceeds
to narrate the formulation and execution of his ingenious plan to
exchange places with this perfect double, kill him, and then use the
corpse to claim his own life insurance. The catch is, however, that
no-one other than Karlovitch can see the slightest resemblance. The
double in this canonical text of the literature of the double is not
one at all.
Nabokov relates Karlovitch’s error to the blindness of communism
in its disregard of differences (1989: 20, 158–9), however Despair is also
peppered with ironic references to trite narrative ploys: ‘a trick of the
trade, a poor thing worn to shreds by literary fiction-mongers’ (1989:
43); ‘Do you feel the tang of this epilogue? I have concocted it accord-
ing to a classic recipe’ (179); ‘Those little tricks, my good man, with life
policies, have been known for ages. I should even say that yours is
the flattest and most hackneyed one of the lot’ (205). With such
Twins as Doubtful Doubles 139
comments, with its intertextual allusions to Dostoevsky (‘Dusty’) and

Gogol and its parody of the theme, Nabokov’s novel is seen by several
critics to mark the point of undoing of the Romantic novel of the
double, a final point following which the double can no longer be
treated with any seriousness in literature. Stuart (1995: 189) considers
it a mockery and rejection of the double as a literary device. For
Troubetzkoy, if the double was ‘put into action by German romanti-
cism,’ it suffered a ‘spectacular liquidation’ by Nabokov (1995: 7).
Despair represents ‘a compendium of all the past figures of the double,
at the same time as it delivers a verdict without appeal’ (1995: 10). It
marks ‘the fall of the empire of the double’ (1996: 189), ‘the final strug-
gle, with Hermann bringing up the rear in the parade of doppel-
gängers’ (1996: 205). Elsewhere, Rogers sees the self-parody of Despair
as essentially a defensive technique to counter the suspicion with
which the double as a literary device has come to be viewed post-
Freud. Caricature is the only means remaining for the modern author
to ‘transcend the limitations of representing doubles in an overt
manner’ (1970: 162), a treatment that Rogers views as ultimately unsat-
isfying (1970: 171).1 And we are left to presume that once this avenue
has been explored, the theme of the double has been exhausted.
Having been thoroughly exploited by the Romantics, and then
mocked by Nabokov in a final showdown, the double in its late twenti-
eth-century manifestations is consigned by critics to the wastebasket of
literary history. And yet it has flourished. How then, have stories of the
double appealed their verdict, and defied their dismissal? Let us briefly
explore some novels and films from the 1980s and 1990s that echo
Despair in their uptake of Nabokov’s ironic portrayal of the double,
before turning to Adaptation. The doubles that follow are all doubtful
in some way: either their resemblance is uncertain, their very existence
is in question, or they are considered of dubious worth or quality. It is
the thematisation of this doubt, this dubiousness that draws them
together and constitutes the grounds for appeal against dismissal.
The shadow of a doubt: postmodern fiction
Although critics have interpreted Despair as symptomatic of the

exhaustion or degeneration of the figure of the double, the story of
Hermann Karlovitch can also be read as a precursor to a series of post-
modern literary doubles, for whom resemblance is in the eye of the
beholder and identification is the prerequisite for identity. Thus,
against the tide of criticism, Slethaug argues that ‘the book is one of
the first, if not the first, to interrogate the conventions of the double
within contemporary fiction’ (1993: 38) in its use of an ‘antimimetic’
double (188).2 For Nabokov’s tongue-in-cheek take on the double is fol-
lowed not only by playful fictions but by elegiac narratives that do not
attempt to resurrect the Dostoevskian or Poe-etic double, but dignify
Karlovitch’s delusion, transporting it into the realm of desire.
Marie-Thérèse Humbert’s A l’autre bout de moi (1979), analysed in the
preceding chapter, can be seen as a successor to Nabokov’s novel in
the history of literary doubles, not in taking on the legacy of the
Romantic tradition, but in taking up the figure of the doubtful double,
and taking it beyond a joke and beyond the simple diagnoses of error
and madness. Humbert suggests that if madness there be in seeing
likeness where others see none, then it is a madness of the most wide-
spread kind. Like Karlovitch, Humbert’s protagonist Anne is a some-
what unreliable narrator, although the signs are far more subtle.
Like Karlovitch, Anne is convinced of her absolute resemblance to her
double – her twin Nadège – and is (at least partially) responsible for
her death. And in both novels, the likeness is in doubt.
The novels depart from one another, however, in the significance
and attribution of the doubt. The narration of Despair offers multiple
opportunities for the reader to take the reality checks Karlovitch
misses, to diagnose his folly and set him apart as singularly deluded.
Either Felix is or isn’t a double, and the reader is offered a vantage
point of superior insight from which to tell. The reader is in no doubt,
and the double collapses. In A l’autre bout de moi, on the other hand,
resemblance is not a clear-cut yes-or-no decision. Likeness comes and
goes, now clear, now disturbed, like a reflection in a swinging glass.
Opinions on the extent of the twins’ resemblance are divided, and
have different and far-reaching consequences for the lives of the
characters, but are never simply right or wrong. There is no clear line
separating reality and desire: identification is a process that flows
between them. Likeness and difference are not poles apart, and their
confusion is not symptomatic of derangement. Nadège is a doubtful
double, slipping in and out of resemblance with the narrator, but
although the reader is not offered a position of smug certainty from
which to judge the likeness or lack of it, the shadow of doubt does not
result in the collapse of the double.
Nabokov’s text straddles eras. Written in Russian in 1932, and trans-
lated soon after by the author into an English version, of which few
copies survived the blitz, Despair was retranslated and simultaneously
revised in 1965 (Nabokov 1989: xi–xii). Written at the height of the
modernist era but rewritten as postmodernist trends were emerging in

literature (cf. Troubetzkoy, 1996: 193–5), it opens up a Romantic theme
to late twentieth-century reworking. A l’autre bout de moi hints at but
falls short of embracing a postmodern fluidity of identity (represented by
Nadège, but put to death by Anne, the survivor), and a reading such as
mine is only possible post hoc. Humbert’s novel is, however, followed
by some 1980s texts featuring doubtful doubles that lend themselves
more easily to the postmodern label, with their playful – although not
necessarily comic – self-referentiality, intertextual allusions, plurality of
perspectives, and mistrust of the authority and experience of the unified
subject. In most of these texts, the textual play is aided by the fact that,
as in Despair, the protagonist is a writer of one sort or another, exploiting
a popular notion of the doubleness of the figure of the author.3
Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note (1984) can be situated in the
wake of Despair.4 Through the blur of his addictions to alcohol, cigar-
ettes and pornography, the antipathetic narrator, John Self, fields men-
acing phone calls from someone who seems to know his every move,
like a second Self. Although eventually a diarist, Self is not strictly
speaking a writer: he is a man with a story he wants to turn into a
Hollywood movie, and he engages an author called ‘Martin Amis’ to
revise the script and enhance its realism and character motivation
(1984: 234). In a progressive mise en abyme, the title of the film changes
from Good Money to Bad Money to simply Money. Low and high genres
collide and ‘Amis’ with his literary pretensions provides the reader
with a position from which to interpret the words of his less literate
counterpart. The conversations between ‘Amis’ and Self provide self-
reflexive commentary on the distance between educated author and
vulgar narrator. Could the second self making the insulting and unset-
tling phone calls be an omniscient Amis with an author’s ‘sadistic
impulses’ (233)? Or the equally knowing reader who, like ‘Amis,’ in-
terprets Self’s narration from an ironic distance: ‘you’re in on it too,
aren’t you. You are, aren’t you’ (268)? Meanwhile, Martina Twain
(Martin Mark Two? – ‘Maybe she was a joker, just like me’ says Martin,
349) gives Self a potted literary education. The caller, however, turns
out to be neither Amis, nor the reader, nor Martina, but Self’s dis-
gruntled, double-crossing business partner. The hallucinatory double is
ultimately revealed as no double at all. The relation of resemblance
is as illusory as the moneyed life Self wants so badly to believe is really
his. But while all the characters repeat that the joke is on Self, that Self
himself is a joke (353), the joke is equally on the reader who followed
the interpretative clues, and Amis is the self-declared joker (349).
Like Amis in Money, Paul Auster is a secondary character in

his own work. Auster’s New York trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, The
Locked Room, first published 1985–86) is a textbook example of
postmodern literature of the double with its dislocation and frag-
mentation of characters, plurality of truths, massive intertextuality,
and representation of experience as a textual weave. The protago-
nist of each of the three intersecting tales is a writer. In the first,
Dan Quinn writes avowedly intertextual detective fiction under the
pseudonym William Wilson (Poe’s famous doubled character) –
‘What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their rela-
tion to the world but their relation to other stories’ (Auster, 1990: 8)
– before borrowing the identity of ‘Paul Auster’ to take on a case as
private investigator. Private investigators feature likewise in the
sequels, and writing becomes analogous to spying as the trilogy
plays between the genres of literary fiction, detective fiction and
biography. Each protagonist shadows a man, attempting to piece
together his life, to the point where one life becomes absorbed into
the other’s. In each case, in trying to account for – and write an
account of – another life, the detective-cum-author becomes the
double of his quarry: ‘Writing is a solitary business. It takes over
your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when
he’s there, he’s not really there. Another ghost’ (Auster, 1990: 209).
If at the outset there is no obvious relation between the watcher and
the watched, the investigator gradually identifies with the object
of his attention to the point where there is nothing left of himself or
of his previous life. Not even a shadow of his former self, he has
become the shadow of the other, his double. Only a complete rejec-
tion of writing and reading – tossing the crucial manuscript into the
trash – can halt the process. This then is a less jocular – although no
less ironic – uptake of the topos of the writer and his doubtful
double. As in Despair, the writer character takes on – to the point of
taking – the life of another who did not resemble him at first.
Although twins appear as a repeated motif in Auster’s trilogy (1990:
89, 235, 253, 308) and Amis’s novel (1984: 165, 217), these are tales
of doubles rather than twins. How then might twins, with their
more tangible kinship, incarnate the doubtful double? Agota Kristof’s
trilogy – The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie (first published
1986–91) – offers a demonstration. Once again writers (of notebooks,
of testimony, of poetry), twins Claus and Lucas relate in large exercise
books their experiences as children and adults in iron curtain Europe.
Although each bundle of documents tells a coherent story, each
succeeding set of notebooks throws doubt on the most basic elements

of the story told previously, such as the existence and identity of one
or other of the brothers. Only at the very end of the trilogy is the
reader finally left to understand that there were indeed two twins.
Their story, however, was not told in Claus’s and/or Lucas’s notebooks:
these were the tale of a phantom doubling, a lost but imagined twin-
ship. During the 1980s, then, the doubtful double ceased to represent
the undoing of a nineteenth-century theme to become emblematic of a
more generalised discourse of identity.
This becomes even clearer when we consider its appearance in a
cluster of fiction by francophone women writers. Here a significant
and quite specific conjunction of genre and gender indicates that the
writer-as-doubtful-double has become a topos in its own right, far
removed from its earlier function of providing ironic commentary on
the figure of the double. The title of Madeleine Monette’s Le Double
Suspect (first published 1980), names the topos: published in English
as Doubly Suspect (2000), it could equally be translated as The Suspect
Double. Valérie Raoul (1996) has analysed the parallels between
Monette’s text and Francine Noël’s Babel, prise deux (Babel, Take Two,
1990). Both are novels in diary form by Quebec women and trace a
particular narrative of female doubling. In Le Double Suspect, Manon
dies, leaving behind a diary that her friend Anne continues in her
place. Writing becomes a mode of mourning, and as Anne writes, she
risks melting into the absent beloved who becomes her double.
Similarly, in Babel, prise deux, Fatima’s diary tells of how her dear friend
and double Amélia dies before her translation of an author’s diary is
complete, and Fatima’s diary then becomes an extension of Amélia’s
project. Although not a diary, Silsie, by French novelist Marie Redonnet
(1990), finds a place alongside these texts. A first person narrative, it
commences with the death of Silsie, and follows the narrator as she
slips into the place left by her beloved friend. She goes to Dolms, a
village whose name is the only word written in Silsie’s poetry note-
book, but the pages remain unfilled as she founders, merged into Silsie
and submerged. Unlike the traditional literature of the (masculine)
double, all of these novels begin rather than end with a death. Rather
than the ‘problem’ of the double being ‘resolved’ by death, here it
is the double that goes some way towards healing the sorrow caused by
a death. In these texts we find death at the source of a doubling in
which resemblance is an uncertain outcome rather than a given.
A specifically feminine doubtful double is created through a process of
identification-as-mourning.
There exist then several clusters of novels, from the 1980s in par-
ticular, that take up where Nabokov left off and leave a question mark
over the resemblance and existence of the double. However, whereas
Nabokov’s doubtful double was seen to represent a final comment on
an exhausted theme, the uptakes of this figure testify to new discursive
arrangements, whereby the slide into doubleness – the identificatory
absorption of one’s self into another – is a consequence of writing and
may even be an act of love.
A discourse, however, is always written out in a genre of one kind
or another. To say that the doubtful double has become a figure of a
postmodern discourse of identity, does not mean that it will be repres-
ented in the same way in different genres. Its appearance in film, for
example, raises representational problems specific to the medium, and
that work to distance it from its prose counterparts, as the following
brief survey shows.
Schwarzenegger and de Vito, and other unlikely lookalikes
Casting doubt over the resemblance and especially the physical re-
semblance of characters at first appears to be a particularly novelistic
possibility: points of view are juxtaposed within the narration,
leaving the reader to question the extent of likeness. The adaptation
to film genres seems counterintuitive: how can the question mark
over resemblance be sustained on screen, where surely likeness and
unlikeness will be immediately obvious? Several filmmakers propose
approaches to the problem.
Hermann Karlovitch comments self-reflexively in Nabokov’s Despair
about the inappropriateness of film as a medium for his story, ironic-
ally because film would be unable to reproduce the absolute likeness he
sees between himself and his double without the traces of the
split screen remaining visible (1989: 15–16). Fassbinder nonetheless
takes up the challenge and shows the unreliability of Karlovitch’s
judgement in this case also. Although it is less of a commentary on lit-
erary doubles, his 1978 film of Despair follows the novel fairly closely.
However, whereas in the novel the reader’s doubts about the double
are not entirely confirmed until the dénouement, the film of necessity
demonstrates the lack of resemblance between Hermann and Felix
from the outset. The importance of Karlovitch’s activity as a writer
(and narrator-mediator of the story) is downplayed in the film,
such that the viewer is positioned as direct witness to and arbiter of
Karlovitch’s delusion.
In a later film, however, Fassbinder returns to the question of the

doubtful double, and explores it in a far more ambiguous way, situ-
ating the viewer equivocally. His last film, Querelle (1982), is based on
Jean Genet’s final novel, Querelle de Brest (1953). Querelle and Robert
are brothers, and from early in the film explicit verbal reference is
made to their similarity, while Querelle denies the resemblance and
the closeness of the brothers. On the other hand, there is an uncanny
likeness between Robert and Gil, who are in fact played by the same
actor (Hanno Pöschl). This similarity, however, strangely passes with-
out comment. Querelle (Brad Davis), who is discovering his pleasure in
homosexual relations, is increasingly drawn towards Gil, whom he
denounces for a murder he himself has committed. In pursuing Gil,
Querelle appears to be projecting his relationship with his twin brother
on to his object of love, and there is a suggestion that sameness and
even self-love are at the basis of homosexual attraction. Two cases of
questionable doubling thus occur in the film: are the brothers as alike
as some say? and are Robert and Gil alike in the eyes of anyone but
Querelle? Querelle plays on these uncertainties, which are never
resolved, for it is not clear whether the viewer is in a position to decide
or is aligned so closely with Querelle as to share his fantasies.
Uncertainty is increased when the resemblance between supposed
doubles is not constant. In Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts
(1985), twins Oswald and Oliver Deuce are played by non-twin
brothers (Brian and Eric Deacon) who, although they start out dis-
tinct from one another, become progressively more identical during
the film to the point where they become indistinguishable (‘I can’t
tell the difference between you any more’) (cf. La Piana, 1990: 28–9).
The ebb and flow of likeness between filmic doubles is not restricted
to art-house cinema: Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman,
1985) portrays a doubling in which characters identify with and
come to resemble one another. In these two films, the viewer is con-
stantly required, if not to doubt her eyes, then at least to revise
constantly her reading of the relationship.
At the other extreme of the continuum between sameness and differ-
ence, Luis Buñuel alternates actors for the female lead in Cet obscur
objet du désir (1977). Rather than two characters who resemble
each other to a greater or lesser extent, here we have one character,
Conchita, played at various times by the equally dark-haired but other-
wise not strikingly alike Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina. The
other characters seem oblivious to the changes in Conchita’s appear-
ance, and as the film progresses the viewer becomes complicit in this
perception of the woman, and is obliged to accept the swap and con-
flate the two portrayals of Conchita into a single – although divided –
character. Is then the split (which corresponds to the split view of
womanhood discussed in Chapter 3) the fantasy of the protagonist,
Mathieu, or of the viewer? The film leaves the question open. David
Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) offers a masculine rewriting of this split,
in a film that similarly invites a psychoanalytical reading, and in
which the viewer finally discovers that she is alone with ‘Jack’ in per-
ceiving him and Tyler as different and separate characters. The lack of
resemblance and the apparent objectivity of the viewer’s position are
revealed as hallucinatory.
Film, then, is not a medium that simply dispels ambiguities of resem-
blance. Doubt over doubles is not necessarily resolved when characters
appear on screen. However, whereas in the novel the doubtful double
is repeatedly linked to authorship and the situation of the writer, in
film it provides a striking opportunity to play with the positioning of
the viewer.
The representation of the doubtful double reaches its apogee in
Ivan Reitman’s Twins (1988), starring Danny de Vito and Arnold
Schwarzenegger as the unlikely siblings. The film tells a familiar story
of estranged twins – one altruistic, the other a hustler – who team up
together. Reitman’s twist on the tale is to suggest that such physical
opposites as these actors could possibly share any family resemblance.
Twins occupies the same kind of ironic position in relation to twin
films as Despair in relation to earlier tales of doubles, and uses the same
figure – the doubtful double – to do so. It parodies its predecessors as it
shows Vincent (de Vito) and Julius (Schwarzenegger) side by side in
matching outfits, with identical gestures and sayings, telepathically
connected to one another’s thoughts and movements, feeling one
another’s pain as they go about finding their mother and fortune. The
poster for the film, in which the tag-line – ‘Even their mother can’t tell
them apart’ – is contradicted by the visible evidence of the identically
dressed twins, already provides the distance between two interpretative
positions (the mother’s, the viewer’s) that is the very definition of
irony. And yet, at the same time as parodying (male) twin films,
Reitman shows that the story does not depend on physical resem-
blance as much as we might believe. Twins could be seen as the twin
film to end all twin films. It depends to such an extent on the story of
reunited twins being already known that it incarnates its triteness, as if
the story is so familiar that only by undoing its essential premise – the
likeness of twins – can anything fresh come of it. And yet, rather than
the end of the line, the last word in twin films, we find it functioning
as a model for its successors when Steal Big Steal Little (1995) promotes
itself (on the video jacket) as ‘Twins with the resemblance.’ As with
Despair, the undoing of the topos is far from definitive. As Adaptation
shows, however, it cannot be ignored.
Adaptation (Spike Jonze): Adapting twins
There are no twins in Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief (1998):
flowers, hunters and collectors, skulduggery, passion and botany, cer-
tainly, but no twins. Spike Jonze’s film based on the book, on the other
hand, is a twin film, and so before exploring how twins are used in the
film and relating them to the doubtful doubles discussed above, the
first question to ask is why they appear at all.
The answer relates to the film’s title, Adaptation (2002). The adapta-
tion is firstly that of the book, for the story of producing the screenplay
is as prominent in the film as the orchids and thief of Orlean’s text.
References to several other forms of adaptation are, however, also to be
found in the film. There are explicit references to evolutionary adapta-
tion (such as that of orchids) with shots of Charles Darwin in his study
and voiceovers of his writings. In parallel with evolutionary forces
is the necessity for people to adapt: ‘Adaptation’s a profound process.
It means you figure out how to thrive in the world’ says Laroche,
Orlean’s eponymous orchid fancier (35).5 Successful screenwriting (in
the voice of Robert McKee) dictates that characters too must evolve.
And – importantly for the purposes of this chapter – genres of writing
and the principles that constrain them are also adapted in the writing
process, in order for the story – the film – to thrive. Not mentioned
explicitly in the film, but pertinent to this study is the adaptation
of stock twin stories, for the introduction of twins is what allows this
particular adaptation from book to film to flourish.
Why, then, does a book about orchid-hunting and collecting become
a twin film? Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman dramatises the process of
the book’s adaptation and the problems it entails. We shall see that
these are problems of genre (how to turn a volume of largely non-
narrative prose exploring a fascination with orchids into a fascinating
feature film) and problems of oldness and newness (how to avoid
repeating the clichés of the past, how to write something new). He also
dramatises the solutions he finds for these dilemmas, the most con-
spicuous of which is the use of twins. Kaufman puts himself into the
script,6 along with his angst, his writer’s block, his frustrated love
life…and his fictional identical twin brother Donald (both twins are
played by Nicolas Cage) in order to ‘put in the drama’ (70) needed to
turn the book into a movie.
‘I don’t know how to adapt this,’ Kaufman the character says
to Marty, his agent. His principal difficulty is that ‘The book has no
story. There’s no story!’ (51). He wants to remain faithful to the book:
‘I wanted to do something simple. Show people how amazing flowers
are’ (51), ‘to create a story where nothing much happens’ (68). He
wants to avoid turning it into ‘an orchid heist movie’ or ‘a movie
about drug running’ or ‘cram[ming] in sex or guns or car chases. […]
Or characters learning profound life lessons’ (5). And yet at the same
time he is acutely aware of the need for story. Scriptwriting guru Robert
McKee (played by Brian Cox) lectures him that ‘first, last, always, the
imperative is to tell a story. Your goal must be a good story well told’
(64–5). Kaufman’s dilemma is not the choice between narrative and
non-narrative forms, but finding and elaborating the story that will
‘show people how amazing flowers are.’ Marty’s answer to Kaufman’s
problem?: ‘Make one up’ (51) – which is of course what Kaufman the
(co)-author of the screenplay does in cloning a twin brother.
If orchids do not lend themselves in any obvious way to dramatisa-
tion, twins do. ‘That’s not a movie,’ says McKee when Kaufman gives
him an account of the book, ‘You gotta go back, put in the drama’
(70). Before adding sex and car chases, Kaufman puts in twins. Twins
are archetypal story material. The very appearance of twin characters
represents the bud of a story ready to unfurl, a story we can already
start to predict from the wealth of myth, literature, anecdote and film
portraying twins that precedes it. Introducing the Kaufman twins turns
Orlean’s book into a story, makes it tellable on screen. Twins are the
cure for Kaufman’s writer’s block, allowing him to ‘dramatise the idea
of the flower’ (Feld, 2002: 123), and twins prove themselves to be at
least as effective as and far more versatile than drugs, thieves and serial
killers for driving a story on film.
In an essay published together with the screenplay, the critic McKee
(not the character) identifies the problem as one of genre: while the
prose writer can ‘dramatize[ ] the invisible, the tides and times of inner
conflict,’ ‘you can’t drive a camera lens through an actor’s forehead
and photograph thought’ (McKee, 2002: 133). Kaufman (not the char-
acter), however, focuses on the viewer’s rather than the actor’s fore-
head. In an interview he explains the need to reach the viewer’s
headspace such that the film cannot be viewed dispassionately: ‘I’m
always trying to figure out a way to take a movie from here, out in
front of you [Charlie frames something out in front of him], and put it here
[he pulls his hands back even with his head]’ (Feld, 2002: 128). Both of
these problems are solved by turning Charlie Kaufman into antithetical
twins: on the one hand, inner conflict – Kaufman’s relation with
himself – is exteriorised and made filmable, and on the other hand, the
story of the flower ceases to be an object of detached analysis, and is
made to resonate with a particular instance of the human condition –
Charlie’s self – in all its idiosyncrasy. Kaufman the character looks for
the flower’s story early in the film:
‘To write about a flower, to dramatize a flower, I have to show the

flower’s arc. And the flower’s arc stretches back to the beginning of
life. How did this flower get here? What was its journey? […] It is a
journey of evolution. Adaptation. The journey we all take. A journey
that unites each and every one of us.’ (40)
He proposes to film a time-lapse version of the evolution of life on the

planet from single cell organisms right through to Susan Orlean in her
office, and indeed we see this footage, but it is Charlie Kaufman’s
personal evolution through his relationship with his twin Donald
that brings the story of adaptation from ‘out there’ to ‘in here.’ Twins
are the means of getting the flower story into the viewer’s headspace.
Like the insect pollinating the flower – ‘By simply doing what they’re
designed to do, something large and magnificent happens […] they
show us how to live’ (23–4) – they give the story life. Donald quotes
Orlean’s book: ‘Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something
more…some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper
balls you drop into water and they bloom into flowers.’ He looks in her
book for ‘[w]hat turned that paper ball into a flower’ (74), for some-
thing that might initiate such a transformation. If we look for that
trigger in the case of the film, we find it is the use of twins.
Doubtful, dubious and doubting
Although there is no doubt about their resemblance (Nicolas Cage

looks astonishingly like Nicolas Cage), the Kaufman twins too are
doubtful doubles. Doubt characterises the twinship in several ways:
Donald’s existence is a subject of speculation; the film abounds with
self-reflexive commentary on the questionable quality of popular filmic
devices; and finally Charlie Kaufman himself is overwhelmed by self-
doubt, partly expressed as a doubt about whether the film we are
watching will indeed ever be made. Interestingly, however, Adaptation

connects more closely with the novels than with the films outlined
earlier in the chapter in its use of doubtful doubles to portray writers
and the writing process. Indeed its parallels with Martin Amis’s novel
Money are particularly evident: hyper-irony with the insertion of the
author as character; the difficulties of writing a film script; highbrow
and lowbrow writers as alter egos. In the transfer of this writerly topos
to a feature film, Adaptation reflects its own preoccupation with the
move from print to screen.
Adaptation sees ‘real people’ (Charlie Kaufman, Susan Orlean, John
Laroche, Robert McKee) played by actors (Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep,
Chris Cooper, Brian Cox), actors playing themselves (John Malkovich,
Catherine Keener, John Cusack), and a fictional character (Donald
Kaufman) appearing both in the credits for co-screenwriting and in
the dedication at the film’s closing (‘In Loving Memory of Donald
Kaufman’). Prominent on the Internet Movie Data Base messageboard
devoted to the film is audience discussion on whether Charlie’s twin
is ‘real’ within the fictional reality of the film, or a figment of his
imagination, a projection of one of his own voices.7
The film opens with a black screen and voiceover representing the
thoughts running through Charlie’s head: his hypochondria, disgust at
his unattractiveness, poor self-esteem, lack of success with women, and
general anxiety. From the start we are made to understand that not
only is Charlie screwed up, but that the vantage point of the viewer
may often be inside his mind. His almost-girlfriend Amelia makes it
plain that Charlie’s psychological problems are evident to others:
‘Okay. Charlie, we’re gonna fix you up. We’re gonna solve the whole
Charlie Kaufman mess once and for all’ (13). Amelia sees his taking on
the orchid script as a positive step and, in a sentence that deserves to
be taken literally, remarks: ‘I think it will be good for you to get out of
your head’ (13). Could Donald be the result of just such a process? The
first inkling we have of Donald’s existence is when Charlie enters his
apparently empty house and shuts the door behind him. As he climbs
the winding stairs, we hear Donald’s voice recounting the domestic
trivia of the day. Donald tends to occupy the upper floor recesses of
Charlie’s personal space, the space where he writes. It is then small
wonder that Donald is seen by some as Charlie’s delusion, as an inhab-
itant of his mind-space, as a character who manages to ‘get out’ of
Charlie’s head (particularly since the idea of getting into and out
of someone’s head was the explicit subject of Kaufman and Jonze’s
previous film collaboration, Being John Malkovich).
The fact that other characters see and react to Donald is presented
by one messageboard correspondent as a clinching argument for
Donald’s filmic reality.8 The lingering doubt, however, comes as
much from the paratext (the credits and dedication) as from the film
itself. Whereas a clear line separates, for example, Charlie’s masturb-
atory fantasies from his day to day world and life with Donald, such
a line is crossed when the character Donald is given equal status to
Kaufman-as-writer-not-character, such that his work figures in the
filmography on the DVD of the film, and he is listed as author even
in the bibliography to the present book. Similarly confounding are
the photos from the filmset showing director Spike Jonze in consulta-
tion with Nicolas Cage playing Donald while Nicolas Cage as Charlie
Kaufman looks on (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 106, 113). Donald’s
existence is a subject of speculation not only in the fictional reality of
the film but in the world of writers, directors, producers and copy-
right that frame the film. Our knowledge that in this latter sphere
Donald is Charlie’s creation, despite the apparent evidence to the
contrary, loops back into our reading of the film, making us wonder
whether Donald isn’t equally Charlie’s invention in the story told on
screen.
Kaufman’s double is equally doubtful in the sense of dubious, arous-
ing suspicions about quality. Unlike Charlie Kaufman, Academy Award
winner for the screenplay of Being John Malkovich, Donald is an
amateur screenwriter of questionable talent and technique: ‘I’m gonna
be a screenwriter! Like you! […] I’m doing it right this time. I’m taking
a three-day seminar’ (10). Donald dreams up a serial killer movie in
which the perpetrator suffers from multiple personality disorder and is
finally revealed to be all the main characters. His brother responds:
‘The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personality.
On top of that, you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really
two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for
other examples of this’ (31). Charlie, on the other hand, is trying to
write something fresh.
While Charlie scoffs at the (over)use of split personality plots in
films, ‘multiple personality disorder’ can be seen as a diagnosis of the
double in Adaptation: however well-rounded the character of Donald is,
Charlie and Donald are understood to be ‘really two aspects of the
same person,’ with Donald as the artist’s lowbrow alter ego. And how
would you shoot Donald’s thriller? ‘Trick photography,’ suggests
Donald. Using a split screen no doubt. Charlie’s verdict on Donald’s
‘pitch’ reflects back on to his own film, and amounts to saying that its
use of twins as doubles is the most hackneyed cinematic ploy of them

all, even more predictable than the serial killer.
Not only a mise-en-abyme of the film, Charlie and Donald’s ex-
changes regarding screenwriting provide a mise-en-abyme of the ques-
tions prompting this book, namely: how and why are twin stories
repeatedly retold? what does it mean to recycle material and what pur-
poses might it serve? and how is the use of twins shaped by genre?
Charlie and Donald’s lines offer explicit commentary on what it means
to retell a familiar story, and how a shift in genre can transform a tale.
Everything old is new again: repetition and adaptation
Like Nabokov’s Karlovitch, Charlie is contemptuous of the use of

routine narrative devices. He scorns Hollywood clichés (‘sex or guns or
car chases’ 5), yet through Donald’s collaboration on the script,
manages to include all of these in the film’s climax with drug running,
alligators, and life-changing conversations to boot. We understand this
as the application of McKee’s suggestion over drinks that Charlie needs
to ‘wow them in the end’ (70) in order to salvage the project. In a
statement that recalls Eco’s solution to triteness, McKee (not the char-
acter) explains the irony as a case of ‘Kaufman get[ting] everything he
wants by confessing to the contrivance’ (2002: 134). In fact the only
contrivance to which he does not explicitly confess is the most obvious
one, the use of the identical twin as the author’s double.
Rather than merely the repetition of a hackneyed theme, however,
Adaptation uses twins to thematise the hackneyed. Charlie’s twin Donald
represents the temptation to put together a script for a blockbuster using
pre-packaged plot sequences, cookie-cutter characters, and a liberal dose
of gore. He personifies the formulaic writer who achieves commercial
success by following a set of rules, indeed a list of ‘commandments’ (52),
about what works, based on what has worked in the past. Charlie is dis-
missive of the principles Donald is learning and of those who teach them:
‘Look, my point is that those teachers are dangerous if your goal is to try
to do something new. And a writer should always have that goal. Writing
is a journey into the unknown. It’s not…building one of your model air-
planes!’ (12).9 Even as he resists repetition, however, Charlie’s own work
is haunted by it. Thus at the very moment that Donald explains his
choice of the most facile of symbols – ‘the motif of broken mirrors’ – to
show the fragmentation of his serial killer (51), we see Charlie’s face in
the mirror at the top of the stairs. The writer(s) of Adaptation may not be
able to avoid such motifs, but (t)he(y) can at least acknowledge their
overuse by attributing them to Donald.
As in so many twin tales, Charlie and Donald are opposites, Donald

representing every writing impulse that Charlie rejects in himself.
Donald is thus the twin introduced to represent a psychological double
in precisely the kind of overt way dismissed by Tymms, Rogers and
Coates as banal and trivial (see Chapter 1). Donald’s association with
low genres is reflected not only in his desire to write a serial killer film
but in his physical positioning in relation to his brother: we first see
him lying on his back on the floor, having parasitically consumed
Charlie’s food in the fridge (Donald is staying temporarily with his
brother until he finds employment). While Charlie walks in to his
bedroom, Donald crawls on all fours to the doorway. As Charlie
critiques screenwriting rules, Donald stretches out on the floor again:
‘I just need to lie down while you explain this to me’ (11), presumably
in order to digest both the alimentary and intellectual nourishment
Charlie provides (Figure 7.1). At various points throughout the film,
Donald lies on the floor while Charlie sits at his writing table, or
Donald sits on the floor while Charlie sits on the bed. On the film set
and again at a party, Charlie stands while Donald sits. Only towards
the end of the film, when Charlie has called Donald in to help with the
Figure 7.1 Nicolas Cage plays twins Charlie (seated) and Donald Kaufman in
Adaptation.
Source: © 2002 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved Courtesy of Columbia
Pictures
script, do they start to occupy the same spatial level: both lying, both
standing, sitting side by side in the car or in the swamp. Until then,
Donald is almost invariably positioned beneath Charlie. Charlie can
thus literally look down on his lowly counterpart.
Donald lives off Charlie, recycling his leavings, whether his shrimp
cocktails, his throwaway plot lines, or his film industry contacts, but it
is above all his repetition of screenwriting commonplaces that earns
him his inferior status and Charlie’s derision. However, if repetition is
a problem for Charlie, no less daunting are the problems of newness. If
‘Nobody’s ever done a movie about flowers before. So there are no
guidelines’ (11), then where do you start? His false starts take him on a
‘jaunt into the abyss’ (67). He simply cannot create something entirely
new that will work as a film. Yet if he recycles the old as his brother
does, he risks producing the kind of crass commercial screenplay he
despises. How then can he reuse something that has been used before?
The solution lies once again in the notion of adaptation. Reiteration is
already inherent in the very idea of adapting a book for the screen: to
adapt is to repeat more or less faithfully in a different genre. Now
unlike the rehearsal of clichés, this process is never viewed by Kaufman
as repetitive, but rather as producing something quite new. Although
the orchid book has already been written, writing it as a screenplay is a
leap into the unknown, is something ‘Nobody’s ever done […] before’
and that has ‘no guidelines’ (11). The genre shift will require its re-
invention. Just as the biological adaptation of orchids can result in ‘the
strangest and most marvelous forms’ (Orlean, 2002: ix), so too can
textual adaptation give rise to startling innovation. The concept of
adaptation allows Charlie a way out of the binary opposition between
the original and the hackneyed.
The lesson of biological adaptation is that repetition produces differ-
ence, rather than simply more of the same, an argument also elucid-
ated by philosophers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Although Charlie is
blind to it at the time, the idea can be glimpsed when he despairs of
his brother: ‘You and I share the same D.N.A. Is there anything more
lonely than that?’ (43). Charlie realises that it is possible to be identical
to and yet feel he has next to nothing in common with his twin. The
point can be extrapolated to the film, which shares the imaginative
matter of the book, and yet constitutes a reinvention of that material.
And ultimately, the film shows that – like Charlie and Donald – block-
busters and ideas films are not made from radically different materials,
but from the adaptation of similar materials to a different genre and
purpose.
In incarnating a division between serious writing and popular

success, Charlie and Donald are reminiscent of the twins of Stephen
King’s thriller The Dark Half and its film adaptation by George
Romero, in which bestseller-writer-cum-killer George Stark repres-
ents the dark unacknowledged underside of mild-mannered-author-
cum-college-professor Thad’s personality. 10 Now although Donald
embodies only Charlie’s baser literary instincts, and not repressed
violent tendencies, he does introduce the serial killer motif, and he
alludes to the thriller genre in a variety of ways throughout the film.
Not only does he position his screenplay The Three unambiguously
within the genre – ‘My genre’s thriller. What’s yours?’ (42) – but
there are a couple of moments when he comes across as distinctly
menacing, explosive moments that are only defused when, after
a pause, he provides an anodyne explanation. Thus he remarks:
‘I need a cool way to kill people’ and only adds ‘for my script’ when
he notices Charlie’s alarm (36). Thus he responds to Charlie tearing
down the McKee Ten Commandments he had taped to the wall
by looming in the doorway and measuring out the words ‘You
shouldn’t have done that.’ The brothers face off until, some instants
later, Donald adds ‘because it’s extremely helpful’ (52).
Adaptation thus flaunts and flirts with its proximity to the thriller
genre, represented by Donald, without simply joining it. It adapts
rather than adopts the thriller. Charlie doesn’t respond to Donald’s
question about which genre he writes in, for at this point he is still
trying to produce something completely new, something as yet
indefinable. Eventually, however, he appears to accept McKee’s pro-
nouncements that ‘we must find our originality within [a] genre’ and
that ‘there hasn’t been a new genre since Fellini invented the mocku-
mentary’ (42). Abandoning his attempts to invent a new genre to
accommodate the adaptation of Orlean’s book, he agrees to borrow
from existing genres (which was of course how the mockumentary
came about) by asking the newly successful Donald to collaborate with
him on the film’s ending. Donald follows the leads Charlie has missed,
finding an unarticulated love interest and a drug connection in
the book, and taking the script to the point where the car chase, the
pursuit through the swamp and the shooting become inevitable.
On the one hand, the contours of the twin plot are predictable here:
Charlie’s ultimate acceptance of his brother’s qualities (personal and
artistic) and of the part of himself that they reflect; Donald’s death
once Charlie has incorporated what his twin represents and become
whole. And yet, rather than merely the assembly of a prefabricated
twin drama, rather than the rehearsal of elements of a familiar genre in

the way that Donald’s The Three is assumed to be, the predictable plot
is paradoxically what shifts the film towards an unpredictable mix of
genres. Accepting his dark half, his inner hack, is the mechanism that
enables Charlie to include drugs, sex, alligators and car chases into a
quirky film about flowers, fascination and what it means to be human,
and allows him to finish the script. Adaptation ceases to position itself
in opposition to the thriller genre and starts to incorporate it. In the
process it becomes something that is neither thriller nor contemplative
art-film. Casablanca, twice cited as the ‘finest screenplay ever written’
(71, cf. 52), now provides the template: not only was it written by
twins (71), but it is defined as a mix of genres (52).
Mixing genres is Charlie’s way out of the impasse in which he finds
himself, the choice between the impossibly new and the stultifyingly
old. In her book, Orlean notes that self-pollination leads to sterile repe-
tition and ultimately extinction. Cross-pollination is not only neces-
sary for survival, but produces new species. With films as with orchids,
invention and novelty come from the cross-pollination of existing
genres/genera (both genre and genus derive from the Latin genus) and,
in the case of Adaptation, even different genii. Charlie is seen as the
genius in the family during the first half of the film (36, 48 although
the latter is a fantasy attribution). Gradually, however, just as Charlie
makes his first positive remark about Donald’s work (with a sincere
statement that ‘It sounds exciting’ 56), people start to recognise
the existence of a second genius in the family (56, 65). Finally their dif-
ferences can be seen as productive, as ‘different talents’ (74) that can be
put to work together to create something strange and marvellous.
The mix of genres means that the clichés from thrillers and twin
dramas are employed not only as crowd-pleasers, not only to finish off
the film with a bang, but to make possible the illustration of the fas-
cination and passion that are the subject of Orlean’s book. They are
used to illuminate Laroche’s phrase that orchids and insects ‘show us
how to live. How the only barometer you have is your heart. How
when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way’
(Laroche 24). Unlike the fascinated orchid-hunter or insect, Charlie is
so paralysed by what others think of him that he can neither follow
any passion, nor write a film about passion. Charlie imagines Orlean
guiding his writing: ‘Just find that one thing that you care passionately
about … then write about that’ (55). For Charlie, that one thing is
human nature, or more precisely his own human nature, his relation
with himself. However, it is not until Donald gives him a lesson on
love, in a sharing of feelings that could only occur in the life-and-death

tension of the manhunt in the swamp, that he can give expression to
this passion. That is to say, the tension of the thriller and the story of
the synthesis of antithetical twins create the enabling conditions for
Charlie to love and write without letting anything get in his way.
Shortly before dying, Donald teaches him that ‘You are what you love,
not what loves you.’ (93), and in the closing scenes of the film, Charlie
is finally free, able to kiss Amelia, simply because he loves her, to
follow his (now mixed) writing instincts, no longer caring what McKee
says (99), and to finish the screenplay.
The film is presented to the viewer as the product of the collaboration
between Charlie and Donald that it depicts, as the story of its own evolu-
tion. This evolution is accompanied by another: that of twins as a filmic
topos. Twins are first introduced as typical narrative material, an ingredi-
ent to make a story tellable, but one associated with overly familiar plots
and imitative productions. In the transformation of the orchid book into
a tale tellable on screen, however, something original is created, a singu-
lar hybrid. From symbolising triteness and a lack of imagination, twins
come to represent the very opposite, the creative process itself.
Reviving the double
Nabokov and Auster, Fassbinder, Jonze and Kaufman are among the cul-
tural heavyweights demonstrating that the double’s fall from favour from
Great Romantic Theme to disreputable device of fiction did not mark the
end of its artistic career. On the contrary, the figure has rebounded with
renewed vigour in the late twentieth century – the time of the ‘culture
of the copy’ (Schwartz, 1996). It is even possible to see the double’s
declining reputation as providing the springboard for its postmodern
reinvention: its designation as trite made it recuperable as kitsch.
The recuperation did not, however, stop there. Nabokov’s playful
displacement of the traditional double gradually evolved into a motif
in its own right: likeness as subjective and fluid, as a product of
identification. Kaufman’s quotation of twins as cliché becomes a com-
mentary on the process of recycling and adapting existing ideas and
tropes, of innovating through repeating in another context, a process
that sums up the turn away from a modernist approach to invention,
from the utopian idea that the totally new is the goal to pursue. Indeed
Kaufman’s recourse to identical twins per se makes the same point: as
the-same-but-different, twins lend themselves to use as a metaphor for
repetition-and-difference, as an emblem for postmodern creativity.
8
Conclusion: Twins and Problems
of Representation
Feminist diversions
Before bringing the threads of the preceding chapters together, I should

like to focus briefly on a recurrent feminist use of twins. The novels con-
cerned – Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991), Margaret Laurence’s A Jest
of God (1966), and Marilyn Bowering’s Visible Worlds (1998) – are too
diverse to constitute a cluster. They can however be rather loosely
grouped around the fact that each uses twins to disturb the dynastic
line.
Twins are particularly suited to this function. Not only does the
simultaneous birth of two infants unsettle the principle of primogenit-
ure (see Chapter 6), but a widespread mythic tradition concerns
anxiety about paternity. Many cultures have believed that twins could
not possibly spring from one father, that two fathers must have been
involved. Harris (1906: 7), Rank (1973: 100–2) and Stewart (2003:
6, 18) all refer to the hypothesis of the dual paternity of twins. In
Greek myth, one twin had a mortal father, while the other was invari-
ably fathered by a god. In totemic cultures, one father was an ancestral
spirit in the form of an animal (Rank, 1973: 102). In other societies,
twins have been seen as evidence of adultery on the part of the
mother, and Marie de France’s ‘Lai du frêne’ provides a twelfth century
literary illustration of this belief. Historically then, twins have been
associated with a disturbance of genealogy in a variety of ways.
The novels by Carter, Laurence and Bowering widen this variety,
each using twins quite differently. What distinguishes them from
the legends above, however, is their purpose: the line of descent is
disordered or interrupted as a way of challenging its role in legitimis-
ing social existence. The novels are diversions in several senses: not
158
Conclusion 159
only do they divert genealogy, but they set up genre expectations

and then upset them, diverting the course of familiar tales and
sometimes deflecting the interest of the story away from twins alto-
gether. And, in the case of Wise Children in particular, they are forms
of entertainment.
Diverting comedy: Angela Carter’s Wise Children
Of the three novels, Wise Children, a rollicking rendition of a twin

comedy, is the only one to allude directly to the myth of dual patern-
ity. Two intertwined families – the legitimate Hazards and the illegit-
imate Chances – boast multiple twins: at least five sets between them,
merry-makers all. The Hazards are a dynasty of celebrated actors, while
the Chances make a living where they can find it: as tap-dancers,
extras, even strippers. However, as suggested by the surnames and the
title, with its allusion to the wisdom of the child that knows its own
father, the paternity of the twins and the legitimacy or otherwise of
their births and professions are inevitably contested. Similarly con-
tested is the literary pedigree of the text. Ostensibly a novel, it adopts
the conventions of theatre (five acts; unity of time, space and action;
dramatis personae listed as such) and recounts a performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (cf. Boehm, 1994; Peach 1998: 139). It
conspicuously engages with the Shakespearean comedies of confusion
with bedtricks, substitute brides, mistaken identity, and misrecognition
of parents and children. The theatrical lineage is however as entangled
as the families themselves: Shakespearean and music-hall traditions
mingle; high and low forms rub shoulders.
The confusion revolves around estranged twin brothers Melchior
and Peregrine Hazard on the day of their hundredth birthday and
75-year-old twin daughters (but whose?) Nora and Dora Chance. The
expectations generated by the allusions to Shakespearean comedy are
that the dénouement will return confused twins to stable perches in
the family tree and reveal the truth of fatherhood. These genre conven-
tions are however overturned. The novel settles no questions con-
clusively but rather emphasises the inconclusive nature of paternity
(‘a father is a movable feast’ 216) and the constructedness of family ties
(‘Grandma invented this family. She put it together out of whatever
came to hand – a stray pair of orphaned babes, a ragamuffin in a flat
cap’ 35, cf. 189). And finally Peregrine produces yet more twins – baby
girls of unknown origin – from his pockets for Nora and Dora to raise
through their own invention of maternity/paternity (230).
As Hardin (1994), Webb (1994) and Day (1998: 204) note, Carter
undertakes a calculated disturbance of notions of genealogy that chal-
lenges not only the organising principle of the patrilineal family, but
the legitimacy of the literary tradition. She uses twin fathers to erode
the notion of a definitive paternity, twin daughters to undermine the
distinction between legitimate and illegitimate, and twin cultural
forms (Shakespearean theatre and popular music-hall) to question
the authority and ancestry of high culture. The literary canon and the
patriarchal family – both bastions of privilege – are shown to be char-
acterised by discontinuity, promiscuity and hybridity.
Diverting romance: Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God
Laurence’s twin tale is less flamboyant than Carter’s, but similarly plays
with genre expectations, those of romance in this case, diverting a
story to a feminist purpose by interrupting the anticipated genealogy.
As Waterston notes in her article ‘Double is trouble,’ (1990: 83) twins
are a persistent motif in A Jest of God. Protagonist Rachel is a thirty-four
year old ‘spinster’ schoolteacher in the 1960s, condemned to spending
her life looking after her elderly mother. She has an affair with Nick,
whose twin brother died in childhood. Nick’s twinship is a wound
kept open by an aging father who confuses him with his brother.
Meanwhile gossip circulates concerning a young unmarried mother
who returns to town to bring up her twins, who are ‘[t]wice as repre-
hensible as one’ baby in the town’s eyes (Laurence, 1966: 58). Add to
these twins the teenage girls that Rachel labels ‘twins from outer space’
(12), and the metaphorical twinning of Rachel (whose interior mono-
logue splits into conflicting voices) and of the town (divided into
Scottish and Ukrainian families), and twinship becomes a refrain in the
novel.
Thus when Rachel’s period is late and she fears (and yet hopes for)
pregnancy, the possibility that she carries twins seems overdetermined.
This would be the ‘jest of God’ of the title, to make her doubly repre-
hensible, and then perhaps doubly saved by a future with Nick. But
it is not. The growth turns out to be a tumour, and contrary to expecta-
tions of a romantic conclusion, Nick is written out of the story
completely. There is no reference to him at all by the end of the novel.
And yet the story has a happy ending. With the removal of the
tumour, Rachel gives birth to herself as an independent woman. She
takes control of her life and ceases to be her mother’s pawn. If the ‘jest
of God’ is finally not a twin pregnancy but a tumour, Laurence’s jest –
Conclusion 161
and we should not underestimate its power to disconcert in 1966 – is

to substitute self-sufficiency for the birth of twins as the novel’s upbeat
conclusion. Thus Laurence uses the twin motif – not twins per se, but
their absence – to resist the genealogical storyline. The absence of
twins where they were expected enables Rachel to refuse the social
roles defined for her by the traditional family structure. Rather than
her future being defined by her offspring and her place in the dynastic
line, Rachel forges her own future.
Diverting adventure: Marilyn Bowering’s Visible Worlds
Marilyn Bowering’s Visible Worlds (1998) similarly hijacks the genre/

gender expectations that it sets up. The prologue describes a Canadian
football match during which Albrecht finds a map pencilled by his
long lost twin brother Gerhard. The map is of Siberia and the Bering
Strait, conjuring up visions of Cold War defections to Alaska, and
taking Albrecht back to when he collected Soviet POWs in his plane
during a prisoner exchange. Football, combat, espionage, escape, air-
planes, a brother to track down: all the elements are assembled ready
for a Boys’ Own story of high adventure. That story, however, is not
told. Indeed, if there is an adventure story at all in the novel, it is that
of a young Soviet woman, Fika, who crosses the icecap to reach Arctic
Canada.
If genre expectations are diverted when Fika’s story intercuts
Albrecht’s, so too are reader expectations of the twin tale rerouted in
the novel. When Albrecht takes us back to his childhood, we start to
recognise a familiar topos. Albrecht and Gerhard are the twin sons of
German immigrants to Canada, growing up between the two world
wars. Gerhard is his mother’s son, tall, fair and Prussian, a talented
musician destined to study in Germany. Albrecht is shorter and darker
and resembles his father, a slaughterhouse worker who fought with the
Canadian Army. Soon enough we discover that Albrecht and Gerhard
spend the war on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Here we are presented with the germ of a story we know, one that has
the clear potential to develop into a full-blown account of brothers sep-
arated by country and culture, facing each other across enemy lines.
That is not, however, the story that will be told. Rather than a tale of
nations and families divided by cultural affiliation, Visible Worlds spins a
tale about filiation more generally. Although the twins are briefly
engaged in opposing armed forces during the war, the main narrative
interest is drawn away from the twins and the twinship, and towards
a series of children, mostly girls, who become separated from their fam-
ilies: swapped as babies, stolen, abandoned, or lost through mistaken
identity. These are never restored to their parents; rather their lives inter-
sect in unpredictable ways. The twin tale unravels; there can be no twin
reunion, just a linking of lives through stories. Visible Worlds is thus a
story of the repeated disturbance of family lines. It trades on the topos of
twins that represent divided nations but diverts it to demonstrate the
discontinuities that produce families and their histories.
If Carter recycles the Shakespearian tradition of comic twins to
disrupt filiation, Laurence does likewise by rewriting the conventions
of romance, and Bowering by not writing the adventure story she
seems to promise. Each reroutes a quite different set of twin tropes to a
similar end, exposing genealogy as tenuous and contingent.
The insistent retelling of twin tales
In her work on genre and gender, Anne Freadman writes of genre

in terms of problem-solving. She suggests ‘that a genre is generated by
a problem of representation, and that insofar as it becomes a genre, it
represents a set of habits, or a tradition, of solutions to that problem’
(1997: 310). Furthermore, in a sentence illustrated to perfection by
these novels, she declares that ‘No text merely violates its genre, or
transgresses its rules. It solves a problem’ (1997: 319). Carter, Laurence
and Bowering each demonstrate the need to transform a genre –
comedies of confusion, the romance novel, the Boys’ Own adventure
story – in order to represent the family in a way that questions the
legitimacy conferred by the patrilineal succession of generations.
Solving this problem involves shifting attention from male to female
characters and bypassing the constraints of conventional endings,
whether children returned to the family fold and embraced by their
fathers, marriage and babies, or a hero’s return. In each case, a twin
tale is diverted from its usual path. Familiar at first, the tale is retold
such that it breaks the generic mould in order to rewrite family history.
And through such breaks, the history of twin tales itself becomes a tale
of borrowings and crossings, of disturbances to the genealogical line.
The urge to break with literary and filmic habits is evident through-
out the preceding chapters. Jonze’s film Adaptation is quite candid in
its illustration of Freadman’s point. Through self-reflexive commentary
on its need to adapt existing conventions in order to turn a book about
orchids into a screenplay, it makes transparent the problem-solving
nature of its engagement with different genres. However many of the
Conclusion 163
other twin tales that have received detailed attention in this book sim-
ilarly take a given model but shift genre conventions in order to find a
way round entrenched habits of representation. This may involve
changing the anticipated gender (a male siren in Lies of the Twins, a
brother who is also a sister in Drag Queen) or nudging the topos along
an unfamiliar path (prolonging the life of a twin couple in On the Black
Hill, questioning resemblance in A l’autre bout de moi) or grafting the
patterns of one genre on to those of another (drama on to horror in
Twin Falls Idaho; comedy on to twin research in Drag Queen, thriller on
to treatise in Adaptation).
Reading the tales together as problem-solving interventions in genre
routines makes it possible to focus on the kinds of questions twins
are being recruited to probe and thus brings us closer to understanding
why certain twin tales are so regularly retold in contemporary culture.
The problems raised by the films and novels studied in this book
are wide-ranging: how to represent a viable long-term relation based
on sameness, how to turn the tables on the virgin/whore split, how to
depict male bodies when masculinity is said to be in crisis, how to rep-
resent joined brothers other than as an object of horror, how to show
that not all homosexualities are alike, how to represent a cultural iden-
tity that is both hybrid and fluid, how to show resemblance as subject-
ive, how to make a film about an abstract passion, how to portray the
contrary impulses driving the writing process.
It is significant that these are not questions about the right of the
first-born to inherit or occupy the throne, or about threats to the social
order. They do not address the relation between man and god, man
and animal, mortality and immortality. Nor do they enquire into the
nature of the human or the power of the divine. Indeed they barely
consider the origins of civilisation or the connection between the
material world and spirituality, those preoccupations of past eras at
the root of so many twin legends.
Some of the concerns underlying the use of the double in nineteenth-
century literature remain important, such as the conflict between con-
scious and unconscious desires, or between opposing attributes of the
self, the incest taboo, the dangers of a closed and narcissistic relation-
ship, the fear of the monstrous. These problems are often, however,
raised in different terms in late twentieth-century twin tales, and the
main changes can be related to questions of gender and sexuality.
Although good and evil twins continue to represent conflicting desires
and attributes, the twins are now just as likely to be female as male, and
when female, their good and evil is overwhelmingly understood in
sexual terms. The dangers of narcissism and incest are increasingly seen
through the prism of homosexuality in the exploration of intense rela-
tions between twin brothers rather than mixed sex siblings. Psycholo-
gical thrills have given way to frissons from physicality: horror and fear
surge less from twins with supernatural or telepathic connections than
from the monstrosity of male bodies that merge. It is not only the
Romantic theme of the double that has been reworked to focus on
gender issues: the centuries-old comic topos of cross-dressing lookalike
twins has been harnessed to explore transgender lives in recent years.
Gender and sexuality are, however, not the only concentrations of
cultural energy prompting contemporary twin tales. Intersecting with
them are questions of personal and cultural identity. These are prom-
inent in tales of twins who embody different traits, or whose resem-
blance to each other is ambiguous, in tales of twins of different
nationalities, or growing up in different ethnic or social backgrounds.
Here competing discourses of identity – identity as unified, coherent
and stable versus identity as multiple, fragmented and contradictory
– find expression. Dividedness is variously seen as a threat to or a
condition of existence.
The emphases I have identified here clearly reflect the profound
shifts in twentieth-century discourses of identity and sexuality, con-
nected in latter years with the rise of feminism and the accompanying
redistribution of gender roles, the gay rights movement, the postcolo-
nial hybridisation of cultures, the postmodern understanding of the
self. These are the areas of investigation that have dominated work in
cultural theory over the past three decades. And it is no coincidence
that the motif of the double has been so conspicuous in theory during
this same period: from Derrida’s speculations on différance and citation
to Butler’s reconception of gender as reiterated performance, through
the gamut of psychoanalytical ruminations on the mirror and the split
self. Omnipresent throughout the humanities since the 1970s are ques-
tions relating to the play of sameness and difference, to the relation
between self and other.
If twins are similarly omnipresent in narrative genres, however, it is
not only because they are able to incarnate these concerns. Crucially
important is the fact that their meaning is not fixed, is always ‘up for
grabs’ to a large extent. They are just as available to reinforce tradi-
tional dichotomies as to undo them; they can serve to expose masquer-
ade as the exception or the norm, to argue for the overriding unity
of the self or its fractured nature, to support a dialectical resolution of
conflict or insist on the indefinite deferral of any synthesis. Their
Conclusion 165
importance, then, is as sites of contention in the struggle to claim legit-

imacy for particular perspectives, and this is what explains the cultural
energy they attract.
Hence it is important to resist gathering the tales up under one broad
banner as if they could be enlisted together in the march towards a
new world view. The big picture of discourses and philosophies, of
history on the move, is ultimately less revealing than those clusters
of texts where a particular story is insistently repeated with small vari-
ations, like a cultural itch that needs constant scratching. That scratch-
ing can have purpose. This is particularly the case when certain
configurations of genre, gender and topos stabilise, and thrillers of sexy
and wifely twin sisters, adventures of brothers fighting in enemy
camps, or horrible homicidal mutant twins become trite. For eventu-
ally someone scratches through to break the pattern and show up the
meanings that were invested in it.
This book has lingered on inventive retellings of this kind, not start-
lingly new twin tales, but tales that have been recycled and at the same
time diverted. The texts in question can be read as exemplary, not in
the sense that they are typical of late twentieth-century twin tales –
often they are not – but in the sense that, like Nabokov’s Despair, they
provide a possible basis for new generic conventions. In each case, the
innovation is prompted by the need to solve a problem of representa-
tion – whether of twinship, coupledom, sexual choices, masculinity,
national identity, the writing of the self, or the self of the writer – or
challenge its habitual solution.
Our need to keep telling twin tales – and to tell them differently – is
not therefore driven by a single impulse, but by the stakes of various
representations. Let us underestimate neither the importance of these
stakes, nor the difficulty of breaking old habits. Representation is the
terrain over which cultural battles are fought, and since no representa-
tion is definitive, no problem of portrayal solved once and for all, our
need to retell and revise the stories currently being told will ensure a
plentiful future supply of twin tales.
Afterword
September 2003, Choisy-au-Bac, France. As I check out a pile of chil-

dren’s books at the village library, my son thrusts another into my
hands and insists we borrow it too: Adeline, Adelune et le feu des saisons
(Grosz, 1996). We snuggle up at bedtime to read: once there were two
sisters, born within an hour of each other, Adeline as beautiful as day,
Adelune as beautiful as night. Adeline’s skin turns golden with the sun,
while Adelune’s remains pale, caressed only by moonlight. In her
blood-red dress, her chin stained red with raspberry juice, Adelune
imagines suitors admiring her sister and oblivious to her own charms.
To rid herself of her rival, she dispatches Adeline on a mission to defy
the seasons and find flowers, fruits and berries in the winter snow.
With her sunny disposition, Adeline succeeds, and her malicious twin
greedily sets out in turn to gather more. Alas, her frosty approach
angers the seasons, who send needles of snow in flurries to wound and
bury her. My daughter clutches me tightly in fear as Adeline races out
into the night, hurrying towards a bright stain on the snow, Adelune’s
dress.
Neither sister, however, perishes, and the prize of a suitor is deferred
indefinitely in favour of the rewards of loving sisterhood. The twins
find warmth curled up against each other, and the hour that separated
them from birth, the hour of solitude dividing day from night disap-
pears as Adelune discovers the delights of day, and Adeline of darkness.
‘And perhaps they are still there today, one beside the other, like two
fingers of a hand, admiring the green valley, whence one day will
arrive suitors in their dozens.’
At the threshold hour of the bedtime story, between day and night,
the fairy-tale appears age-old, and yet it tiptoes towards a revised
happily-ever-after, in which the suitor has lost his pivotal position in
166
Afterword 167
the twinship, and the stakes of the story have changed. And a future
generation of story-tellers absorbs another model and learns to tell and
re-tell, to twist and spin tales of twins.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. I have analysed part of this series (texts by Ovid, Freud and Lacan) in an
earlier article (de Nooy, 1991b).
2. I take ‘topos’ to refer not simply to a topic (such as twins) but to its embedding
in a particular thematic arrangement or ‘place’ – conjoined twins, twins as
sexual rivals, good and evil twins, the author and his twin/double, the incestu-
ous twin couple, twins in enemy camps, twins separated at birth – which will
tend to coincide with its occurrence in a particular genre.
3. The notion of retelling is not intended to imply that at some point of origin
there exists a master-story, which is then reproduced in the form of versions
of the original. Rather than assuming a hierarchy between renditions,
I follow Barbara Herrnstein-Smith in understanding all stories as particular
retellings, ‘constructed by someone in particular, on some occasion, for
some purpose’ (1981: 167). Thus telling always involves some retelling, some
gesture towards existing stories, and retelling entails both repetition and
difference.
4. Rank’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’ was first published in 1914 and substantially
revised in 1925. English (1971) and French (1973) translations exist. I shall
refer to both on occasion, as the work translated in the French volume
includes additional chapters, one of which is devoted to twinship (cf. the
publication history detailed in Rank, 1971: vii–ix).
5. The relative coherence of the Romantic literature of the double – or at least
of the established canon of works representing it – makes it possible to
conceive of The Theme of The Double during this period: a singular theme
of a paradoxically singular double. The analysis of contemporary twin tales is
a rather different enterprise. Given the diversity of late twentieth-century
examples, any such singular Twin Theme in recent literature is unlikely to
emerge.
6. An exception is Rockwell’s interesting study of resemblance in medieval
French romance (1995).
7. See de Nooy (1988, 1991a, 1998) for analyses of the uses of the figure of the
double as a theoretical tool.
8. This purpose parallels that of Lucy Fischer in her study of the range of
cinematic representations of maternity (1996).
Chapter 2
1. In some versions of the myth, Castor and Pollux are able to remain
together, living one day on Olympus and the next in Hades. Harris analyses
the ‘divided immortality and shared mortality’ of the Dioscuri, relating
them to other pairs of legendary twins of whom one is immortal and the
168
Notes 169
other mortal (Amphion and Zethus, Herakles and Iphikles) (1906: 4–5;
cf. 1903: 61).
2. Harris (1906) shows the extent of the influence of the ‘cult of the heavenly
twins’ throughout the ancient and Christian worlds.
3. The fratricidal (or sororicidal) twin is amply illustrated in films such as Tim
Hunter’s Lies of the Twins (1991), George A. Romero’s The Dark Half (1993),
Tom Berry’s Twin Sisters (1992), and Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female
(1992). The representation of twin rivalry in popular film is discussed in
detail in Chapter 3 below.
4. Havelock Ellis (1928) notes that although the Narcissus myth had endured
in the popular and literary imagination since Ovid’s time, prior to the mid-
nineteenth century the figure of self-love evoked the enchantment of
youthful beauty.
5. See Chapter 4 below on the amniotic representation of the domestic and
professional environment of the twins in Dead Ringers.
6. Doubles feature in much of Redonnet’s writing: see Silsie (1990) and
Doublures (1986).
7. The Silent Twins also incorporates the evil twin theme, thus reflecting both
of the major threats to twinship in Romantic and post-Romantic twin tales.
8. Angela Carter’s Wise Children, recounting Dora and Nora’s seventy-five
years together on- and off-stage, seems to be the only example of a novel of
longevity of a twin sister couple. I have not included it in the corpus for
this chapter, for as Boehm (1994) and Peach (1998: 139) show, Carter’s rol-
licking tale openly engages with its Shakespearean comic antecedents, that
is to say, a quite different literary tradition from the one to which White,
Tournier and Chatwin allude. Moreover, the calculated disturbance of
notions of genealogy and paternity (see Chapter 8) overrides considerations
of coupledom in Carter’s novel.
9. The reworking of Western myths is a defining characteristic of Tournier’s
novels.
10. It is significant that the twins of each novel are men, and thus inherit
a lengthy literary and mythic tradition from which female twins were
virtually absent until the twentieth century (see Chapter 3).
11. White writes of ‘three solid mandalas’ in the Lascaris family, the others being a
sister and an aunt of Manoly (1982: 116) and is quoted by friend Elizabeth
Knight as referring to Lascaris as his ‘solid mandala’ (Lawson, 2003). The
mandala is a Jungian image of wholeness and perfection (Marr, 1991: 451–2)
and White acknowledges the influence of Jung in his novel (1982: 146).
12. In conversation with Zazzo, Tournier distances himself from this view (Zazzo,
1984: 51), and Davis also casts doubt on the seriousness of his statement in
Le Vent Paraclet, pointing to the ‘pervasive irony’ of the text (1988: 68).
13. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) epitomises this vision of the
same-sex couple.
14. This layout is not reproduced in the English translation (Descombes, 1980).
15. See Chapter 7 for an analysis of postmodern twin tales.
16. The image can be compared with the Gordian knot representing the
twinship in Bille’s ‘Le noeud’ (1974).
17. In particular, it does not explore the figure of The Writer, for each of
the twins is in his own way a writer. This is another recurrent twin topos
170 Notes
and Penelope Farmer, in her anthology Two or The Book of Twins and
Doubles (1996), devotes a section to ‘Authors as Doubles.’
18. Tournier draws heavily on Zazzo’s Les Jumeaux: le couple et la personne in
Gemini, as he acknowledges in the conversation prefacing Le Paradoxe des
jumeaux (Zazzo, 1984).
19. It is difficult not to see an allusion here to Jean Paul Richter, who wrote
under the name Jean Paul and introduced the term doppelgänger in his 1796
novel Siebenkäs.
20. Perrot similarly sees in literary twins the resistance to the passage of time
(1976: 218).
21. Derrida develops the notion of a lop-sided step or rhythm – une démarche
boiteuse – in Glas (1986).
22. Mireille Rosello points to this paradox whereby Paul, in order to re-establish
sameness, must incorporate difference (1990: 20).
23. There is some doubt over which twin is immortal: is it the ethereal Jean,
who fades from this world before inhabiting Paul’s absent limbs? or is it, as
Maclean suggests (2003: 70), Paul, resurrected after his mutilation and
burial in the Berlin tunnel?
24. Helmut von Bracken used the terms Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister
for the Interior to characterise these roles, apparently common in twinships
(Zazzo, 1984: 14). The division between a wandering (indeed piloting) twin
and his more domestically oriented brother also appears in Corrick’s The
Navigation Log and Bowering’s Visible Worlds. In both these novels, as in those
of Tournier and Chatwin, the traveller is the first to disappear. Only in
Chatwin’s, however, does the death occur at an advanced age.
25. Although the women are not immobile in Dead Ringers, their mediation sim-
ilarly serves to maintain the closed circuit of sameness. Elliot shares his female
bedfellows with his twin, but these exchanges serve as little more than a safety
valve for the twins, restoring perfect resemblance (Elliot: ‘You haven’t had any
experience until I’ve had it’). Difference remains extremely threatening.
Although the ‘traffic in women’ initially succeeds in maintaining twinship,
as soon as Claire stops the traffic, refuses to be exchanged and insists on the
difference between the twins, the twinship spirals down into death and decay.
26. In Arthur’s case, totality is the ideal not only of twinship but of relation-
ships in general.
27. In her analysis of the triangles formed by twins and the woman they love,
La Piana similarly identifies a postmodern turn in twentieth-century twin
narratives: ‘The movement is one from the concept of twins as comp-
lementary parts of one whole, a concept which supports rather than ques-
tions the notion of the unified subject, to an alternative vision of twins as
true reproductions of each other without a source, as simulacra without an
original’ (1990: 15).
Chapter 3
1. Although the twins/doubles are not clearly rivals in Sisters or in Doppelganger,
they are in conflict over a man, and the good girl/bad girl distinctions are
similar to the other films in the list. Single White Female is another complicated
Notes 171
case in that the twin relation is displaced on to the flatmate, and the rivalry
has a possessiveness not featured in the other films.
2. The proportion varies across cultures (Bryan, 1992: 19-20) and is rising in
Western countries due to fertility treatments and the older average age at
which women are having children.
3. René Zazzo distinguishes between the theme of the double and that of the
couple in narrative uses of twins. These themes have been associated with
different genres at different historical moments (1984: 131–74). Films
involving non-identical twins and the handful of films in which identical
twins are played by different actors – ‘real-life’ twins (On the Black Hill,
The Third Walker, Twin Falls Idaho) or brothers (The Krays, A Zed and Two
Noughts) – tend to explore the relation between the brothers, to address the
question of the brothers as couple.
4. In 2002, the Dutch film of Tessa de Loo’s novel De Tweeling (released as
Twin Sisters) finally provided a counter-example, with Dutch and German
actresses playing the title roles of twin sisters raised in different countries.
5. Erich Kästner’s novel Das doppelte Lottchen has been filmed repeatedly: in
Germany in 1950 and 1994 (as Charlie and Louise); in Japan (1952) and
Britain (Twice Upon a Time, 1953); and most famously in the U.S.A. as The
Parent Trap (1961), which boasts three made-for-television sequels and a
1998 remake. Twice Blessed (1945) and It Takes Two (1995) also follow a very
similar storyline.
6. Although the virgin/whore pattern can also be found in recent popular
fiction (for example Danielle Steel’s bestseller Mirror Image, which contrasts
wanton feminist and devoted wife twins), novels of female twins constitute
a far less homogeneous group of texts. The sisters in Terry Prone’s Racing the
Moon (1999), for example, are distinguished by world views and life choices,
not sexual proclivities, while Sandra Brown’s thriller The Switch (2000),
avoids the good/bad girl routine as one twin hunts for her sister’s killer.
Meanwhile, among more literary examples, Alice Thompson’s Justine (1996)
engages head-on with the virgin/whore split in a self-consciously literary
rewriting of Sade’s Justine/Juliette pair and Angela Carter’s Wise Children
(1991) portrays non-rival twin sisters with an equal interest in sexual sub-
terfuges. The wider range of representations is no doubt due to the fact that
while popular films have been predominantly produced through the studio
system, the novel is a comparatively low budget production with a history
of female participation.
7. Rogers’ very wide definition of the double, which goes well beyond looka-
likes, twins and siblings, enables him to include pairs such as the Virgin
Mary and Eve.
8. Fischer goes on to argue that the twins in fact represent feminised and mas-
culinised images of women. Fischer interprets these films as requiring
women to reject their masculine attributes in favour of feminine ones
(1989: 172–215).
9. Indeed they fit the pattern of ‘doubtful doubles’ analysed in Chapter 7.
10. The exception would be Single White Female, in which the good girl’s life is
not depicted as inadequate in any way.
11. Twin Sisters and Mirror Images II, a tits-and-bums version of much the same
tale, include virtually all the elements described in this composite picture of
172 Notes
the 1990s female twin film. The threat of male castration represented by the
evil twin is analysed by Barbara Creed in her reading of Brian de Palma’s
Sisters (1993: 131-8).
12. Rogers takes this view in his chapter ‘Fair maid and femme fatale’ in which
he proclaims that ‘women in the twentieth century have become whole
again.’ Rogers argues that the ‘virginal maiden/temptress prostitute’ dicho-
tomy has waned in serious twentieth-century literature, where it can only
appear ironically. With regard to popular genres, although he notes that
‘sentimental stereotypes persist,’ he cites the image of Doris Day as a new
kind of ideal woman: ‘clean and yet sexy, desirable and yet not dangerous.’
The somewhat tentative, optimistic conclusion he draws is that ‘man’s
attitudes toward women are reaching maturity’ (1970: 130).
13. It is perhaps not coincidental that the film is framed as a story imagined by
a female journalist.
14. Keeping the Faith is exemplary in its portrayal of cooperation between male
doubles over a woman. In this film, best friends rabbi Jake and priest Brian
have led parallel lives since childhood. Both fall in love with Anna but their
conflict is resolved when Brian determines to recommit to celibacy and
renounce his love in favour of furthering Jake and Anna’s relationship
and the possibility of their marriage.
15. Indeed Doniger points to the competing mythology of twin brothers who
do not replace one another in bed, despite all temptations to do so (2000:
243).
16. In Take Two, poor, sincere Barry falls in love with the wife of his rich but
unworthy and unloving twin Frank. This is a scenario that Wolfenstein and
Leites mention as common in early films such as The Prisoner of Zenda
and The Masquerader (1950: 140–1). It is not representative of recent twin
films or even of films from the 1940s.
17. According to Rank’s influential 1914 study, the double indicates a splitting
of the self as a paranoid defence against the threat of death and the related
fear of sexual relations. Following this tradition, Thomas Elsaesser refers to
‘the nightmare of the split self’ (1989: 28) and traces the legacy of Romantic
authors such as Hoffmann and Poe in his work on the fantastic in German
silent cinema. More recent films such as The Dark Half and Raising Cain also
inherit from the Romantic tradition and lend themselves to interpretation
in terms of a split between the loving father and the fearsome punishing
father (cf. Rogers, 1970: 138–160). While it is not impossible to understand
Lies of the Twins in these terms, the mise en abyme of the interpretative
situation within the film cautions against this psychological reading, as we
shall demonstrate.
18. For Rogers, ‘doubling in literature usually symbolises a dysfunctional
attempt to cope with mental conflict’ (1970: vii).
19. Rogers’ chapter on the fair maid and the dark lady discusses the use of
colour in representations of the virgin and the whore (1970: 126–37).
20. It is worth noting that Lies of the Twins is based on the novel Lives of the
Twins (revised and published a year later in Great Britain as Kindred
Passions) by Rosamond Smith (1987, 1988), an alias of Joyce Carol Oates.
21. Cf. Doane (1987: 43). Doane’s point is also taken up by Fischer (1989:
187–8) and Creed (1993: 132) in their studies of female twin films.
Notes 173
22. A couple of other poses in the film also deserve a mention for they portray
further readily available twin scenarios. There is a shoot in which a white
woman lies between two black men, one beneath and one above her, all
very lightly clad, a graphic reflection of Rachel’s dilemma. Then there is an
art exhibition attended by Rachel and Elle. At one moment their two bodies
are together framed by an oval sculpture. The two forms enclosed in the
one round space constitute a common representation of a stultifying twin
relation turned in on itself (cf. chapter 2 above). As Elle remarks, ‘It’s a
hell of a hole.’ But the next time Rachel finds herself at the gallery, she is
confronted by a painting featuring a large triangle, a further image of her
situation.
23. Isabella Rossellini’s autobiography (1997) gives ample illustration of
modelling as quotation and the use of existing images and icons to inspire
photographs.
24. This scene features elements common to many twin stories. Firstly the
showing of photographs is usually an important (often revelatory) scene.
The fact that James is on the left finds discursive support in the ‘Treehouse
of Horror VII’ episode of The Simpsons, involving conjoined twin Barts,
where Dr. Hibble remarks: ‘Isn’t it interesting how the left or sinister twin
is invariably the evil one.’ As for the insistence that there is always one
dominant twin, the competitive aspect of the relation tends to revolve, in
female twin films, around the question of beauty rather than achievement:
‘Identical twins are never really identical – there’s always one who’s prettier’
(Single White Female).
Chapter 4
1. In clear contrast to the conjoined brother films are the appearances of con-
joined twins in prose fiction genres. Significantly, the emblematic texts here
– from Mark Twain’s ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’ (1899) to John Barth’s
‘Petition’ (1968), Judith Rossner’s Attachments (1977), and Darin Strauss’s
Chang and Eng: A Novel (2001) – are not horror stories, and there is no pro-
liferation of these tales during the 1980s and 1990s. The examples are over-
whelmingly stories of male twins, yet here the relation is not portrayed
as maternal, and separation – although a dominant issue – is not figured as
separation from the mother. Similarly, Alison Pingree’s fine analysis of
nineteenth-century biographical accounts of Chang and Eng demonstrates
that their connection was represented not as maternal but as a political
metaphor, a symbol of the national unity to which the fledgling United
States aspired (1996). Both genre and era are clearly key determinants in the
representation of the fraternal relation.
2. The representation of twin sisters as virgin and temptress, rivals over the
same man, is so pervasive that it dictates female twin stories across most
genres. A newspaper article on the death of conjoined Russian twins Masha
and Dasha Krivoshlapova headlines ‘One was an alcoholic obsessed with
sex, the other a stubborn prude’ and goes on to tell that their relationship
was soured forever when they both fell in love with the same boy (Roberts,
2003).
174 Notes
3. Creed (1990: 125), Frank (1991: 467), Humm (1997: 62) and Showalter
(1992: 141) all refer to Cronenberg’s preoccupation with the maternal.
4. The term ‘parasitic twins’ refers to the rare cases of asymmetrical conjoined
twins, where one is smaller, less formed and dependent upon the other
(Gilbert, 1996).
5. Badley argues that the very way in which the monstrous becomes the object
of the gaze already involves a feminisation, for traditionally the (male) gaze
has objectified a feminine other (1995: 119–20; cf. Williams, 1984: 87–8).
6. ‘The Thing and I’ is a segment of a Halloween episode of The Simpsons
(‘Treehouse of Horror VII,’ 1996) in which Dr Hibbert separates conjoined
twin Barts, one good and one evil. The series is of course known for its self-
conscious parodying of both social and generic conventions, so the choice
of this scenario to caricature the horror genre is significant: not only is
Halloween seen as quintessential horror, so too are conjoined twins and
the possibility of their separation. They are associated with the genre to the
point where they are able to represent it.
7. It is worth noting that Basket Case II, ‘Humbug’ (The X-Files) and Twin Falls
Idaho all provide commentary on the place of monstrosity in the post-
freak-show era. Each depicts the carnivalesque community as a refuge
from the humiliations of what amounts to unlimited public exhibition in
everyday life.
8. In the psychoanalytical literature, Marjorie Leonard (1961) draws attention
to the parallels between the process of separating from the mother and that
of separating from one’s twin to establish individual identity (cited Stewart,
2003: 66–7).
9. Rogers, in his study of the ‘fair maid and femme fatale’ opposition in the
literature of the female double, interprets the virgin/whore dichotomy as a
splitting of the mother (1970: 126–37). This can be contrasted with the con-
joined twin scenario we are examining which involves a splitting from the
mother.
10. Although this may seem far-fetched, there is a very rare form of conjoined
twins, the foetus in fetu, that occurs when ‘an imperfect fetus is contained
completely within the body of its sibling’ (Gilbert, 1996; Bryan, 1992: 64).
Rare, but not unknown: in 1997 Cairo doctors reportedly operated on an
Egyptian teenager with abdominal pains and discovered an underdeveloped
twin foetus lodged next to his kidneys. Eighteen centimetres long, weighing
two kilograms, and with a head, an arm, a tongue and teeth, the foetus had
apparently been feeding off his brother throughout his life. The fully-
formed teeth were those of a sixteen-year-old (‘Oh, brother!’). Fiedler dis-
cusses further examples (1981: 223–5), and both he and Farber refer to
the difficulty of differentiating between teratomas (cysts containing skin
cells, nervous tissue, teeth, and so on, which may derive from development
of an unfertilised egg, a kind of oocytic twin) and foetuses in fetu (Farber,
1981: 7).
11. Two further films – A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and The Krays (1990) –
confirm this insistence. Neither is clearly a horror film, but each flirts with
the horror genre: Peter Greenaway’s art-house drama A Zed and Two Noughts
focuses relentlessly on death and decay, while blood is used to represent
both the relation between the twins and the violence of their lives in
Notes 175
Peter Medak’s fictionalised biography of the gangster Kray brothers. Both

films incorporate images of conjoinedness, and there is a strong emphasis
on the maternal in each case. In The Krays this takes the form of continual
references to hatching, birth, abortion, dead babies, and to men as child-
like, and is clearly associated with the role of Violet, the all-powerful
mother worshipped by her twin sons, who never really separate from
her. Given her omnipresence, the twins have no opportunity to usurp
the maternal role. The proximity to the horror genre and the occasional
allusion to joined bodies again seem to impose a maternal theme, but
since neither horror nor conjoinedness define the film and its characters,
maternity is firmly anchored to the mother.
The dense and complex A Zed and Two Noughts is a more ambiguous case,
not least because of the difficulty of defining its genre. Here the possibility
of conjoinedness is more salient in the twin relation, and once again, refer-
ences to pregnancy, abortion, egg-hatching and childbirth pervade the film.
Alba is the maternal figure generating most of these, but it is noteworthy
that Oliver and Oswald wish to appropriate her corpse on her death, and
ask to be re(con)joined using the placenta from her abortion. In this film,
the indeterminacy of genre is reflected in the shifting assignment of the
maternal.
12. Review attributed to Janet Maslin, New York Times.
13. In this sense, Twin Falls Idaho can be seen as paving the way for the comic
drama Stuck on You (2003), also a conjoined twin brother film about love
and separation, but once that no longer needs to distance itself so emph-
atically from the horror genre and its patterns of representation and indeed
barely alludes to motherhood.
14. The use of this technique is a convention of identical twin films (Dead
Ringers being a prime example, with split screens showing Jeremy Irons con-
fronting Jeremy Irons) but here it is not used for the twins (played by Mark
and Michael Polish), but for other ‘freaks.’ Once again a convention is cited
and transposed.
Chapter 5
1. The tradition inspired by Plautus’s Menaechmi embraces not only Shake-
speare’s A Comedy of Errors but the musical comedies The Boys from Syracuse
and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Recent comic films
on the theme of twins separated at birth and reunited include Big Business,
Twin Dragons, and the multiple film versions of Erich Kästner’s tale Das
doppelte Lottchen (including The Parent Trap).
2. Stewart’s interviews with parents of twins show just how widespread this
experience is (2003: 125).
3. In Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities, the fantasy is that of narcissistic
union in an incestuous relation between Ulrich and his sister Agathe: ‘It
goes back a very long way, this desire for a Doppelgänger of the opposite
sex, this craving for the love of a being that will be entirely the same as
oneself and yet another, distinct from oneself’ (Musil, 1995, Vol. 2: 982).
Hillel Schwartz points to a further narrative use of mixed sex twins, noting
176 Notes
the frequency with which virtually identical boy/girl twins have appeared
in children’s literature, often being used to show that with the same up-
bringing, girls and boys are equally capable. He cites not only the Bobbsey
Twins books by Laura Lee Hope, but also a series by Lucy Fitch Perkins
dating from 1911–14 (Schwartz, 1996: 29–30). A parallel purpose can be
found in a recent New Zealand film, Niki Caro’s Whalerider (2002), in which
the use of mixed sex twins provides the opportunity for a feminist interven-
tion in Maori tradition: a girl takes her dead twin brother’s place in the
hierarchy of the clan.
4. Cf. Levitan and Montagu (1977), cited Haynes (1995: 102).
5. The hypothesis of oocytic twins (in which a single ovum splits and is fer-
tilised by two separate sperm) is also discussed by Gedda (1961), Bulmer
(1970: 8–18), MacGillivray et al. (1975), and Farber (1981: 9). The degree of
genetic similarity of such twins would depend on the timing of splitting
of the female cell: Bulmer distinguishes between (in order of increasing
genetic similarity) primary oocytary, secondary oocytary, or uniovular
dispermatic possibilities of oocytic twin fertilisation (1970: 9–12).
6. Cf. ‘in certain rare instances, singletons are discovered years after birth to
carry cells that have been incorporated into their bodies from a DZ twin
who died prenatally. Such cases are known as chimeras’ (Farber, 1981: 7).
7. Pam et al. (1996) offer a highly critical analysis of the ‘equal environments
assumption’ at the basis of many influential twin studies purporting to
distinguish hereditary and social factors.
8. Researching the extent to which these similarities can be taken as proof
that such behaviour is genetically determined is clouded by logistical
difficulties in data collection, a point highlighted by Wendy Doniger in
‘What did they name the dog?’ (1998). As Bouchard himself admits:
[T]he probability that two people have the same name can’t be validated
against some random action. What you need is a population of couples
the same age as the twin couples with their kids, and then you’d need to
know the frequencies of all these names. Think about how much work
you’d have to do to gather that kind of information – but then you’d
have to do it for everything! About the car they owned! About the beach
they went to! What they named their dog! You’d have to collect that
data from every pair. And then, what would it tell you? (quoted Wright,
1997: 50)
In a thorough study of the existing research on monozygotic twins reared
apart, Farber concluded in 1981 that it was flawed by blatant bias in the
data collection: lack of random sampling, tautological determination of
zygosity, over-representation of families of low socio-economic status, vari-
ation in the degree of separation, and in the awareness of twinship (15–21).
Many of these design flaws persist in recent studies. For example, when
zygosity is determined by an assessment of similarity (rather than DNA),
monozygotic twins who differ significantly from each other are excluded
from MZ statistics, biasing the sample (cf. Stewart, 2003: 46).
9. While Kinsey’s 1948 seven-group continuum is considerably more refined
than the het/homo binary, it is worth noting that it still lacks the capacity
for nuance of Hirschfield’s 1896 bi-dimensional scale, which allowed for
twenty permutations (cf. LeVay, 1996: 22, 47).
Notes 177
10. Wendy Doniger defines the bedtrick as a case of ‘going to bed with some-
one whom you mistake for someone else’ (2000: xiii).
11. In fact, it reflects behavioural research findings far more than it reflects the
discourses of gay culture: sex with brothers regularly appears on Internet
discussion sites in narratives about first sexual experiences and is a common
pornographic trope. Photographic volumes The Brewer Twins: Double Take
(1998) and Steven Underhill’s Twins (1999) are examples of gay erotica
featuring twins. My thanks to Mark McLelland for alerting me to this point.
12. The recognition scene in Drag Queen can be contrasted with that of John
Irving’s A Son of the Circus (1994), which follows a more usual pattern:
when the identical twin brothers, separated at birth, finally meet towards
the conclusion of this lengthy novel, each recognises his gayness in the
other. This lengthy novel works through (and displaces) a number of recur-
rent twin motifs – the twinning of cultures (Canada/India, Hindi/Western),
the twinning of life and art, circus freaks – and even dwells on the identical
male/female pair in the character of the transsexual serial killer.
13. David Halperin outlines the definitional problems and the uses and abuses
of the label queer (1995: 61–7), while Annemarie Jagose explores in detail
the shifting identifications associated with the term, its lack of definitional
limits, and its political consequences and contestations (1996).
14. The idea that sexuality and sexual behaviour reveal the truth of the self is
analysed by Foucault (1976, Vol. 1: 101–5).
15. The interpenetration of these discourses is not uncommon, as Jagose points
out: ‘Combinations of the two positions [essentialist and constructionist]
are often held simultaneously by both homophobic and anti-homophobic
groups’ (1996: 9).
16. Cf. Terence Cave on signs and tokens of recognition: ‘the birthmark, the
scar, the casket, the handbag – all those local and accidental details on
which recognition seems to depend’ (1988: 2).
17. A similar point is made in Jennie Livingston’s documentary film Paris is
Burning, which demonstrates that the seeming naturalness of normative
identities is not a given but something to be accomplished. Competitors
at drag balls act out straight identities such as ‘businessman’ and explain
that ‘the idea of realness is to look as much as possible like your straight
counterpart,’ ‘to be able to blend, that’s what realness is.’ As Butler explains,
‘“naturalness” [is] constituted through discursively constrained performat-
ive acts’ (1990: viii).
Chapter 6
1. SBS (Australian Special Broadcasting Services) television news, 14 August
1997, 6.30 pm AEST.
2. When stories of twin rulers surface in modern times, these too invariably
conclude with the elimination of one twin. In these tales, however – and to
date there are nine film and television versions of Alexandre Dumas’s novel
The Man in the Iron Mask – the twins are identical. Typically a just king and
a despot, they no longer represent the nation but personal qualities, good
and evil. Individual rather than social identity is in question.
178 Notes
3. Marie Vautier (1986, 1991) details the historical parallels and Gary Smith
(1995) analyses the ideological concerns of the novel. It is perhaps overdeter-
mined that a bilingual country continually obliged to distinguish itself from
its powerful neighbour should be represented in terms of twinship of one kind
or another. In fact, all three of the scenarios sketched in this chapter have
been used to symbolise Canadian identities: Saul’s socio-political analysis and
Godbout’s novel invoke conjoined twins; Sylvie Gagnon’s La Bibliothécaire et
l’Américain (2002) uses twins raised apart to figure Quebec/U.S.A. relations and
identities (interestingly the twins are of mixed sex, highly rare in allegories of
national identity, but explained through the unequal power relations between
the two countries); and the film The Third Walker features a changeling twin in
its tale of francophone and anglophone brothers.
4. Interesting for the purposes of this chapter is the revelation that when they
are reunited in their forties, Jack is astounded by their absolute resemblance
(Oskar was ‘wearing my face’) while Oskar is shocked by their difference (Jack
seemed an old man, twenty years older than himself). Sameness and differ-
ence are apparently in the eye of the beholder. The conflicting interpretations
echo the ambiguity in Humbert’s twin novel discussed below.
5. If the twins’ underlying sameness is here valorised as the precondition of
peace and understanding, we saw in Chapter 2 that sameness posed a threat
to the twins’ very survival. The crucial difference is that between stories of
cohabiting twins (stifled by sameness) and, here, separated twins (united by
similarities).
6. The theme of parallel lives is widely exploited in the literature of the
double. Characters encounter their alter egos and see the life they could
have lived if different choices had been made. The contrast sometimes coin-
cides with a difference in nationality, for example in Henry James’s ‘The
jolly corner’ (first published 1908), in which, after leading a hedonistic
adult life in Europe, the middle-aged protagonist confronts the American
businessman he would have become had he stayed in New York. Z îzêk
(2001) sees the exploration of alternative lives as an important theme
in Kieslowski’s films, especially La Double Vie de Véronique (1991), in which
French Véronique and Polish Weronika are not twins but – like their
countries of origin – elusive doubles of one another.
7. The film is, however, as much concerned with exposing the split image of
womanhood discussed in Chapter 3 as it is with national or political divi-
sions. See Imre’s (2003) discussion of the feminist critique doubling the
national allegory.
8. Stewart’s research demonstrates the Anglo-American tendency to associate
twinship with notions of identical appearance and behaviour (2003:
119–25, 157–60).
9. All quotations from Humbert’s novel are my own translations.
10. Michael Walling describes the ethnic composition of Mauritius and its
consequences for cultural identity:
There is no indigenous population: the African or Creole group are the
descendants of slaves from Madagascar and Mozambique, the Indians of
indentured labourers imported after the abolition of slavery. More recent
arrivals include Chinese traders and Filipino migrant workers. There is also
a numerically small but economically and politically powerful group of
Notes 179
Franco-Mauritians, the white descendants of the original colonisers. The

island is very small–about 1,860 square kilometres – but has a population
close to 1.2 million. This makes it one of the most densely crowded
and culturally diverse spaces on the planet. In such an environment, the
emergence of a national identity is fraught with problems. People tend to
define themselves in opposition to other Mauritians (and hence through
communal politics), rather than through identification with them. The
one unifying factor is the common Creole language. (Walling, 2002)
11. The authoritative French dictionary Le Petit Robert demonstrates the
paradox quite explicitly, defining identité as both ‘caractère de deux
objets de pensée identiques’ (quality of two identical objects of thought)
and ‘caractère de ce qui est un’ (quality of oneness).
12. Here I extrapolate to the context of another island nation of mixed heritage
– my own. In 1996, a political party calling itself ‘One Nation’ was formed
in Australia, attracting support for its anti-immigration, anti-multicultural-
ism platform. The ideal oneness of the nation was evidently to be achieved
through the uniformity of its citizens.
13. From this potted summary it should be clear that – true to its cover promise
– A l’autre bout de moi is indeed a classic twin tale, reproducing many of the
narrative elements discussed in Chapter 2. In particular, it is worth noting
the parallels between the ‘solution’ to Anne’s dilemma and the conclusion
of Michel Tournier’s Les météores (1975), in which Jean disappears and Paul
synthesises his lost brother into his own existence. It appears that in the
imagination of twinship, it is only when one twin disappears that the two
can really become one.
14. Here I am indebted to the work of Ross Chambers in Room for Maneuver:
Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (1991) on resisting recruitment by
the narration.
15. An island … or an egg (see Chapter 2).
16. The article quoted here, ‘The inexpressible child,’ was first published in
1988.
17. I use the masculine pronoun advisedly in referring to Lacan’s scenario.
18. This is in marked contrast, not only to Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage,
but also to traditional stories such as Die Frau ohne Shatten, or the myth
of the vampire invisible in the mirror. As Clément Rosset points out in
Le réel et son double, the shadow customarily represents external evidence of
tangible existence in these stories (1976: 112–13).
19. The grammatical impossibility of the French – a singular subject ‘I’ with a
first-person plural conjugated verb – is difficult to reproduce in translation.
20. The sudden Oedipal recuperation of the story does not resolve the complex-
ities of the relation between the sisters sufficiently to be driving the narrat-
ive in the way Anne suggests. Indeed it provides further evidence of Anne’s
unreliability as interpretor of her story.
Chapter 7
1. Although Herdman does not cite Nabokov’s novel specifically, he would
appear to concur with these assessments, for he writes: ‘When a phantom
180 Notes
double is clearly ascribed by the author to mental delusion and functions

as nothing more than a symptom of madness, then the device of the
double is in a state of decadence’ (1991: 50).2.
2. For Slethaug, Nabokov ‘leads his readers to understand that resemblances
and signifying associations are not inherent in the objects themselves but
lie in the perceptions, deliberate and intentional misconceptions, meta-
phorical linkings, and acts of the viewer’ (1993: 189).
3. Penelope Farmer devotes a chapter of her anthology Two or The Book of
Twins and Doubles to the trope of the author as double (1996: 447–70).
4. Miller notes Amis’s admiration for Nabokov’s Despair (1985: 414–15).
5. Page numbers refer to the published shooting script of the film (Kaufman
and Kaufman, 2002).
6. In an interview with Rob Feld, Kaufman explains that the film reflects fairly
accurately his ‘false starts’ and the confusion he experienced in trying to
adapt the book for the screen (Feld, 2002: 123).
7. For example, postings to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/board/ under
the threads ‘Is Donald real?’ (28 May–24 July, 2003) and ‘Is Charlie a
schizo?’ (5–8 July, 2003).
8. Contributions to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/board/ by ‘wompa1,’
(31 May and 2 June 2003).
9. Kaufman reveals his anxiety about repetition in the interview with Feld:
‘I hate it when I repeat myself’ (Feld, 2002: 120).
10 In a further connection between the texts, we may note the popularity of
King’s non-fiction volume, On Writing (2000), offering budding writers the
kind of advice that Charlie sees as ‘dangerous.’
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Filmography
Adaptation (2002) dir. Spike Jonze.

The Bad Sister (1983) dir. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen.
Basket Case 1 (1981) dir. Frank Henenlotter.
Basket Case 2 (1990) dir. Frank Henenlotter.
Being John Malkovich (1999) dir. Spike Jonze.
Big Business (1988) dir. Jim Abrahams.
The Boys from Syracuse (1940) dir. A. Edward Sutherland.
Cet obscur objet du désir (1977) dir. Luis Buñuel.
Charlie and Louise (1994) dir. Joseph Vilsmaier.
Cobra Woman (1944) dir. Robert Siodmak.
The Dark Half (1993) dir. George A. Romero.
Dark Mirror (1984) dir. Richard Lang.
The Dark Mirror (1946) dir. Robert Siodmak.
Dead Ringer (1964) dir. Paul Henreid.
Dead Ringers (1988) dir. David Cronenberg.
Despair (1978) dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) dir. Susan Seidelman.
Dominick and Eugene (1988) dir. Robert M. Young.
Doppelganger: The Evil Within (1992) dir. Avi Nesher.
Das doppelte Lottchen (1950) dir. Josef von Báky.
Double Edge (1992) dir. Stephen Stafford.
Double Impact (1991) dir. Sheldon Lettich.
La Double Vie de Véronique (1991) dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Double Vision (1992) dir. Richard Knights.
Les Enfants terribles (1949) dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.
Equinox (1992) dir. Alan Rudolph.
Fight Club (1999) dir. David Fincher.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) dir. Richard Lester.
The Guilty (1947) dir. John Reinhardt.
It Takes Two (1995) dir. Andy Tennant.
Jack’s Back (1987) dir. Rowdy Herrington.
Joined: The Siamese Twins (1989) dir. Paul Norman.
Keeping the Faith (2000) dir. Edward Norton.
Killer in the Mirror (1986) dir. Frank De Felitta.
A Kiss Before Dying (1991) dir. James Dearden.
The Krays (1990) dir. Peter Medak.
Lies of the Twins (1991) dir. Tim Hunter.
The Lookalike (1990) dir. Gary Nelson.
Maximum Risk (1996) dir. Ringo Lam.
Mirror Images I (1991) dir. Gregory Hippolyte.
Mirror Images II (1993) dir. Gregory Hippolyte.
My Twentieth Century [Az én XX. századom] (1988) dir. Ildikó Enyedi.
On the Black Hill (1988) dir. Andrew Grieve.
190
Filmography 191
Oskar and Jack (1997) dir. Frauke Sandig.

The Parent Trap (1998) dir. Nancy Meyers.
The Parent Trap (1961) dir. David Swift.
Paris is Burning (1990) dir. Jennie Livingston.
The Prince of Tides (1991) dir. Barbra Streisand.
Querelle (1982) dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Raising Cain (1992) dir. Brian De Palma.
The Silent Twins (1985) dir. John Amiel.
Silent Twins: Without My Shadow (1994) dir. Olivia Lichtenstein.
The Simpsons: The thing and I, Treehouse of horror VII (1996) dir. Mike B.
Anderson, Season 8, 4F02.
Single White Female (1992) dir. Barbet Schroeder.
Sisters (1973) dir. Brian De Palma.
Sisters or The Balance of Happiness (1979) dir. Margarethe von Trotta.
Steal Big Steal Little (1995) dir. Andrew Davis.
A Stolen Life (1946) dir. Curtis Bernhardt.
A Stolen Life (1939) dir. Paul Czinner.
Stuck On You (2003) dir. Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly.
Take Two (1987) dir. Peter Rowe.
Thicker Than Water (1993) dir. Marc Evans.
The Third Walker (1978) dir. Teri McLuhan.
This World Then the Fireworks (1996) dir. Michael Oblowitz.
Twin Dragons (1992) dir. Ringo Lam and Hark Tsui.
Twin Falls Idaho (1999) dir. Michael Polish.
Twin Sisters (1992) dir. Tom Berry.
Twin Sisters [De Tweeling] (2002) dir. Ben Sombogaart.
Twins (1988) dir. Ivan Reitman.
Twins in Black and White (1998) dir. Dagmar Charlton.
Twins of Evil (1971) dir. John Hough.
Whalerider (2002) dir. Niki Caro.
The X-Files: Humbug (1995) dir. Kim Manners, Season 2, Episode 44, Production
n° 2x20.
A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) dir. Peter Greenaway.
Index
abjection, 78–9 Chang and Eng, 68, 70, 115–16, 173

Acrisias and Proëtus, 23, 114 n. 1
Adaptation, xvii, 6, 13, 138, 147–57, changelings, 118–20, 136
162–3 Chatwin, Bruce, xv, 6, 19, 27–8,
A l’autre bout de moi, see Humbert, 29–30, 35–46, 163
Marie-Thérèse clichés, xvii, 59, 98, 100–1, 147, 154,
Amis, Martin, xvii, 15, 141–2, 150, 156, 157
180 n. 4 see also double as hackneyed;
Amphion and Zethus, 17, 114, 169 repetition
n. 1 closure of twin relation, 21–2, 24–6,
Anna Karenina, see Tolstoy 30–7, 40–4, 70, 83, 130, 173
Auster, Paul, xvii, 15, 142, 157 n. 22
see also narcissism; island metaphor
Badley, Linda, 70–1, 79–80, 174 n. 5 Coates, Paul, 9, 10, 12, 13–14, 137,
Bad Sister, The, 50 153
Barth, John, 8, 15, 173 n. 1 Cobra Woman, 47, 50
Basket Case, 48, 53, 68–9, 71–5, 77, Cocteau, Jean, 25
82, 85, 174 n. 7 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 78
bedtrick, 15, 16, 17, 50, 51–2, 54–5, Colapinto, John, 90–1
62, 98, 109, 112, 159, 177 n. 10 comedies of confusion, 10, 11, 17–18,
behaviour genetics, see twin studies 22, 49, 50, 97, 105, 108–9, 112,
Being John Malkovich, 150, 151 159, 162, 164
Bersani, Leo, 28–9, 103–4 conjoined twins, xv–xvi, 5, 27, 68–88,
Big Business, 49, 50, 175 n. 1 115–16, 136, 173 n. 1, 174 n. 6,
Bille, S. Corinna, 25, 169 n. 16 175 n. 11, n. 13
birth order, 33, 44, 61, 108 seen as foetal, 70–7, 82
principle of primogeniture, 114–15, foetus in fetu, 174 n. 10
158, 163 and gender, 68–9, 79, 87–8, 173
Blum, Joanne, 17 n. 2
Boklage, Charles, 92–3 seen as monstrous, 68, 75, 78–80,
Bouchard, Thomas, 94, 117, 176 n. 8 83, 164, 174 n. 7
Bowering, Marilyn, xviii, 7, 158, parasitic, 70, 71, 75, 174 n. 4
161–2, 170 n. 24 see also separation of twins; freak
Bristow, Joseph, 28 shows; maternal imagery
Brown, Sandra, 171 n. 6 Corrick, Martin, 170 n. 24
Bryan, Elizabeth M., 69, 92, 171 n. 2, creativity, conceptions of, 6, 82, 157
174 n. 10 Creed, Barbara, 71, 172 n. 11,
Bullough, Vern L., 82 174 n. 3
Bulmer, M. G., 176 n. 5 Cronenberg, David, xv, 25, 70–1, 80,
Buñuel, Luis, xvii, 145 87, see also Dead Ringers
Butler, Judith, xviii, 108, 112, 164,
177 n. 17 Dark Half, The, 48, 53, 69, 81–3, 85,
155, 169 n. 3, 172 n. 17
Carter, Angela, xvii, 19, 158–60, 162, Dark Mirror, 47, 50
169 n. 8, 171 n. 6 Dead Ringer, 47
Castor and Pollux, see Dioscuri Dead Ringers, 25, 27, 41–2, 48, 53, 54,
Cet obscur objet du désir, 145 69, 70–3, 75, 82, 85, 87, 169 n. 5,
Chambers, Ross, 32, 57, 179 n. 14 170 n. 25
192
Index 193
death in twin stories, 10, 121, 122–3, in literary theory, viii, 14, 26, 164,
129–30, 135 168 n. 7
and mourning, 17, 143 nineteenth-century theme of, 5,
of rival twin, xiv–xv, 23–4, 47–8, 11–15, 17, 18, 19, 23–4, 139,
64, 114–15, 169 n. 3, 177 n. 2 157, 163, 168 n. 5, 172 n. 17
of soul-mate twin, xiv, 21–6, 44–5, persecuting, 24, 30
70, 86 postmodern theme of, xvii, 13,
suicidal murder, 24, 30, 36, 73 15–16, 138–47, 157
see also stagnation of twin relation see also resemblance; identical
decay, images of, 21, 24–6, 30, 46, 48, twins; changelings
79, 129, 174–5 n. 11 Double Edge, 51
deconstruction of oppositions, 100, Double Impact, 19, 48, 53
102–5, 107–8, 112, 154 Double Vie de Véronique, La, 178 n. 6
Deleuze, Gilles, xviii, 26, 154 Double Vision, 51
de Loo, Tessa, 19, 117, 171 n. 4 Drag Queen, see Rodi, Robert
de Nooy, Juliana, 132, 168 n.1, n. 7
Derrida, Jacques, xviii, 14, 15, 26, 33, Eagleton, Mary, 7
154, 170 n. 21 Eco, Umberto, 137, 152
différance, 16, 29, 33, 44, 164 Ellis, Havelock, 29, 169 n. 4
see also deconstruction Elsaesser, Thomas, 172 n. 17
Descombes, Vincent, 14, 29 Equinox, 53
Despair Esau and Jacob, xvi, 17, 23, 114
novel, see Nabokov, Vladimir
film, 144 fairy-tales, 65, 166–7
Desperately Seeking Susan, 50–1, 145 Farber, Susan L., 93, 174 n. 10,
Diamond, Milton, 90 176 n. 5, n. 6, n. 8
Dioscuri, 23, 27, 30, 31, 34, 40, 44, Farmer, Penelope, 26, 169–70 n. 17,
168–9 n. 1 180 n. 3
see also legends, foundation myths Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, xvii,
diversity of twin stories, xiii, xviii, 1, 144–5, 157
4, 115, 165, 168 n. 5 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 92
dizygotic, see non-identical twins feminist narratives, xv, 17, 56,
Doane, Mary Ann, 58, 172 n. 21 158–62, 176 n. 3
Doležel, Lubomír, 9 Fiedler, Leslie, 78, 174 n. 10
Dolto, Françoise, 3 Field, Andrew, 13–14
Dominick and Eugene, 48, 49 Fight Club, 9, 146
Doniger, Wendy, 9, 15–17, 172 n. 15, film
176 n. 8, 177 n. 10 1940s woman’s film, 17, 48, 50–2, 66
doppelgängers, see double, the action, 48, 49, 53
Doppelganger: The Evil Within, 48, 51, auteur cinema, 48, 69, 144–5
69, 170 n. 1 horror, xv–xvi, 5, 48, 53, 68–9, 71,
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 11, 24, 27, 31, 77–81, 83, 84, 86, 87–8, 163,
139, 140 174–5 n. 11
double, the lack of mixed sex twins in, 49
author as, 81–3, 141–4, 146, 150–3, romance, 69, 83, 84, 88
155–6, 169–70 n. 17, 180 n. 3 split screen, 63, 84, 144, 151,
contrasted with twins, 10, 11, 15, 175 n. 14
118, 142 thriller, xv, 5, 6, 24, 47–52, 53,
decline of, xiv, xvii, 12–15, 19 65–6, 69, 81, 151, 153, 155–7,
figure of, 10–11, 31, 119, 121, 163, 165
126–8, 171 n. 3, n. 7, 178 n. 6 see also under individual titles
and gender, 17, 49, 143, 175 n. 5 see also popular culture; genre and
as hackneyed, xvii, 13, 137–9, gender; twin brothers; twin
151–3, 157 sisters
194 Index
film adaptations, 144, 147–9, 154, Henenlotter, Frank, xv, 71, 72

162 see also Basket Case
Fischer, Lucy, 17, 50–1, 64, 168 n. 8, Herdman, John, 11, 12, 15, 49, 137,
171 n. 8, 172 n. 21 179–80 n. 1
Foucault, Michel, 15, 99, 177 n. 14 Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara, 168 n. 3
Frank, Marcie, 71, 174 n. 3 Hogg, James, 11, 24
fraternal twins, see non–identical homosexuality, see sexuality
twins horror, see film, horror
fratricide, see death of rival twin Humbert, Marie-Thérèse, xvii, 6, 19,
Freadman, Anne, 3–4, 7, 8, 56, 84, 162 115, 120–36, 140–1, 163
freak shows, 75, 78, 84, 86, 174 n. 7 Humm, Maggie, 70, 174 n. 3
Freud, Sigmund, xviii, 3, 12, 25, 52, Hunter, Tim, xv, 6, 47
79–80 see also Lies of the Twins
Gagnon, Sylvie, 178 n. 3 identical twins, xvi, 13, 17–18, 21–2,

Galton, Francis, 91 24, 26, 49, 175 n. 14, 177 n. 2,
Garber, Marjorie, 78 as characters, 32–5, 40, 47, 55, 59,
gay gene, hypothesis of, xvi, 93–7, 61, 98, 148, 154
98–9, 102–3, 105–6, 112–13 differences between, 90–2, 109,
Gedda, Luigi, 176 116, 154, 173 n. 24, 178 n. 4
Gemini, see Tournier, Michel of mixed gender, 90–2, 97,
gender 175–6 n. 3
ambiguity, 79–80, 88, 91–2, 104–5 compared to non-identical, 92
contemporary preoccupation with, see also resemblance
xiv, xviii, 163 identity
see also genre and gender; identity; constructivist and essentialist, xvi,
masculinity; mixed sex twins; 105–8, 110, 177 n. 15
twin brothers; twin sisters; contemporary preoccupation with,
conjoined twins xviii, 164
Genet, Jean, 145 cultural, xvi, xvii, 5, 6, 115–22, 124,
genre 128, 132, 134–6, 163, 164,
conventions, shifting, 7, 9, 18, 19, 178–9 n. 10
27, 65, 69, 77, 83–6, 88, 147, discourses of, 59–60, 120, 122, 164
152, 154–6, 159–63, 165 floating, 110–13
diversity of, xviii, 1, 4 gay, xv, 28–9, 98–105, 177 n. 11,
and gender, xiv, xv, 5, 6–7, 9, 17, n. 12
19, 27, 48, 49, 65, 68–8, 80, 88, gender, 91, 104–5, 108
143, 162, 165 hybrid, xvii, 115, 120, 135, 163
and topos, 4, 9, 17, 27, 68, 77, 80, and identification, xvii, 124–8,
84, 88, 115, 144, 165, 168 n.2, 133–6, 139–44, 145, 157
171 n. 3 individual and social, 17, 24, 121,
see also film; literature 177 n. 2
Girard, René, 22, 23, 41, 54 performative, 107–8, 110, 164,
Godbout, Jacques, 116 177 n. 17
Greenaway, Peter, 25, 145, 174 n. 11 postmodern, 5, 113, 141, 143–4,
see also Zed and Two Noughts, A 164, 170 n. 27
Guerard, Albert J., 10 psychoanalytical theories of, 78–9,
Guilty, The, 47 125–7
relational, 128, 132, 136
Halberstam, Judith, 78, 79 self-contained, 121, 124–5, 132,
Hallam, Clifford, 2, 13–14 134–6
Halperin, David M., 103, 177 n. 13 sexual, xvi, 6, 79, 89–90, 98–106,
Harris, J. Rendel, 9, 158, 168–9 n. 1 112, 163–4
Haynes, James D., 94, 96 see also masculinity, crisis of
Index 195
incest, 18, 25–6, 98, 163–4, 177 n. 11 postmodern, 141–4, see also
irony, xvii, 101, 137–9, 141–3, 144, postmodern culture
146, 150, 152 romance, 160–2
Irving, John, 177 n. 12 theatre, 10, 11, 22, 159–60
Irwin, John T., 11 see also comedies of confusion;
island metaphor, 124–5, 128, 130, genre
132, 134–6 see also under individual authors
Lookalike, The, 49
Jack’s Back, 49, 53
Jagose, Annamarie, 177 n. 13 Maney, Mabel, 90
James, Henry, 178 n.6 masculinity, 71, 104
Joined: The Siamese Twins, 69 crisis of, xv–xvi, 5, 6, 68, 79–80, 88,
Jonze, Spike, xvii, 13, 147, 150, 151, 163
157 feminisation of male body, 68, 71,
see also Adaptation; Being John 74, 75, 77, 80, 82, 88
Malkovich maternal imagery
twin relation as maternal, xv, 5,
Kallmann, F. J., 97 68–9, 70–7, 79–88, 175 n. 11
Katz, Jonathan Ned, 99 umbilical link between twins, xvi,
Kaufman, Charlie, xvii, 147–57 68, 70, 73–4, 76–7, 175 n. 11
Keeping the Faith, 172 womb metaphor, 25, 32–3, 70,
Keppler, Carl F., 24, 29 72–3, 82, 128–32, 134
Kieslowski, Krzysztof, 178 n. 6 Maupassant, Guy de, 11, 24
Killer in the Mirror, 48 Maximum Risk, 49, 53
King, Stephen, 155, 180 n. 10 McKee, Robert, 147–8, 152, 155, 157
see also Dark Half, The Menander, of Athens, 11, 97
Kinsey scale, 96, 176 n. 9 Miller, Karl, 14, 180 n. 4
Kiss Before Dying, A, 49 Minnesota project, 93–5, 117
Krays, The, 19, 48, 69, 171, 174–5 see also twin studies; Bouchard,
n. 11 Thomas
Kristeva, Julia, 14, 15, 78–9, 125–6, Mirror Images, 48, 51, 171 n. 11
131–2 mirror motif, 123–7, 135, 152
Kristof, Agota, xvii, 118, 142–3 mirror stage, 125–7
mixed sex twins, 18, 25, 26, 49, 90–2,
Lacan, Jacques, xviii, 3, 14, 15, 125–7 97, 116, 175–6 n. 3, 178 n. 3
La Piana, Siobhan, 41–2, 145, 170 Molière, 11
n. 27 Monette, Madeleine, xvii, 15, 15,
Laurence, Margaret, xviii, 158, 160–1, 143
162 Money, John, 90–1
legends, myths and, xvi, 1, 8, 10–11, monozygotic, see identical twins
17, 23, 27, 49, 136, 158, 163, Musil, Robert, 175 n. 3
168–9 n. 1 myths, see legends
foundation myths, xvi, 17, 23, 24, My Twentieth Century, 119, 178 n. 7
114–5, 120, 163
see also Dioscuri Nabokov, Vladimir, xvii, 12, 13, 15,
LeVay, Simon, 94, 97, 176 n. 9 138–41, 142, 144, 146–7, 152,
Lies of the Twins, xv, 6, 47–8, 49, 54, 157, 165, 180 n. 2
55–67, 163, 172 n. 20 narcissism, xiv, xv, 3, 25–6, 30–2, 34,
literature 40, 45–6, 163–4, 169 n. 4
adventure stories, 161–2 national identity, see identity,
ancient, 18 cultural
Canadian, 17, 116, 143, 178 n. 3 nature/nurture debates, 91–3, 94, 97,
nineteenth-century, 3, 5, 11, 18, 107, 112–13, 175–6
23–4, 50, 79 Noël, Francine, 143
196 Index
non-identical twins, 18, 26, 49, 171 Prince of Tides, The, 49

n. 3 Prone, Terry, 171 n. 6
as characters, 30–1, 118, 123 psychoanalytic interpretations, xviii,
compared to identical, 92 2–4, 12, 14, 25, 26, 55, 71, 78–80,
legends of, 17, 114 125–7, 131–2, 146, 164, 179 n. 20
see also mixed sex twins contrasted with discursive, 3–4,
58–60, 64–5, 172 n. 17
On the Black Hill see also abjection; mirror stage;
novel, see Chatwin, Bruce narcissism
film 48, 171 n. 3 Puterbaugh, Geoff, 94–6, 98, 99
opposite sex twins, see mixed sex
twins queer theory, 28–9, 102–4, 177 n. 13,
opposites, twins as, 21, 46, 53, 107, n. 17
153, 163 see also identity, sexual
see also synthesis of twin identities; Querelle, 145
twins, good/evil; virgin/whore
dichotomy race, questions of, 119–22, see also
Orlean, Susan, 147–50, 154–6 identity, cultural
Oskar and Jack, 117, 178 n. 4 Raising Cain, 49, 53, 172 n. 17
Rank, Otto, 2, 9, 13, 17, 24, 49, 158,
Parent Trap, The, 49, 171 n. 5, 175 168 n.4, 172 n. 17
n. 1 Raoul, Valérie, 17, 143
parody, xv, xvi, xvii, 12, 59, 89, 97–8, recognition of twin, 99, 109, 110,
100, 108, 112, 138–40, 146 127, 177 n. 16
see also irony; clichés see also comedies of confusion
paternity, questions of, 19, 158–62, Redonnet, Marie, 15, 25, 143, 169
169 n. 8 n. 6
myth of dual, 158–60 repetition
Perrot, Jean, 11, 18, 24, 26 of stories, xvii, xviii, 2, 19, 112,
Pillard, Richard C., 96, 97 137, 152, 180 n. 9
Pingree, Allison, 115, 173 n. 1 and performative identity, 106, 108
Plautus, Titus Maccius, 11, 97, 175 n. and innovation, 6, 8, 9, 138, 154,
1 156–7, 162–3, 165, 168 n. 3
Poe, Edgar Allan, 3, 11, 18, 21–2, see also clichés
24–5, 140, 142 resemblance
Polish, Mark and Michael, xvi, 83, between characters, 32–5, 38, 40,
175 n. 14 42, 98–9, 109, 111, 121
see also Twin Falls Idaho between rivals, 41, 54, 61, 64
popular culture, xv, 24, 29, 171 n. 6 between twins raised apart, 94, 95,
popular film, 47–54, 66–7, 69, 97, 98–9
145 in a couple, xiii, xiv–xv, 21–2, 24–7
status of, 15–16, 19, 137, 141, and cultural tensions, xvi, 5, 6, 115
149–50, 151–7, 159–60 relation to death, xiv, 22–6, 178
see also double, decline of; film; n. 5
literature and same-sex relations, 28–9
pornography, 51, 69, 177 n. 11 as subjective, xvii, 120, 122–4,
postmodern culture, 5, 13, 16, 29, 46, 126, 139–47, 157, 163, 164,
137–8, 141 178 n. 4, 180 n. 1
see also double, postmodern; see also comedies of confusion;
identity, postmodern identical twins; sameness and
poststructuralism, 14–5, 26, 29, 33, 46 difference
predictability of plots, xvii, 57, 64, rivalry between twins
148, 155–6 jealousy, 36, 39, 73, 83, 124
see also repetition mythic, xvi, 17, 23, 114–15
Index 197
for parent’s love, 39, 133 twin studies of, 90, 94–7, 99
over sexual partner, xv, 41, 47–8, see also identity, gay; identity,
49–54, 61, 63, 65–7, 69, 166, sexual; incest
170–1 n. 1, 173 n. 2 Shakespeare, William, 11, 18, 22, 90,
see also death of rival twin 97, 159–60, 169 n. 8, 175 n. 1
Rockwell, Paul Vincent, 168 n. 6 Showalter, Elaine, 174 n. 3
Rodi, Robert, xvi, 6, 19, 89, 97–113, Siamese twins, see conjoined twins
163 Silent Twins, The, 25–6, 169 n. 7
Rogers, Robert, 2, 12, 13, 24, 49, 137, Simpsons, The, 173 n.24, 174 n. 6
139, 153, 171 n. 7, 172 n. 12, n. Single White Female, 48, 169 n. 3, 170
18, n. 19, 174 n. 9 n. 1, 171 n. 10, 173 n. 24
Romantic literature, see literature, Sisters (de Palma), 47, 69, 170 n. 1,
nineteenth-century 172 n. 11
Romero, George, xv, 81, 155, 169 n. 3 Sisters or The Balance of Happiness, 50
see also Dark Half, The Slethaug, Gordon E., 11, 15, 139–40,
Romulus and Remus, xvi, 17, 22, 23, 180 n. 2
114 Smith, Rosamond (Joyce Carol Oates),
Rosello, Mireille, 33, 100–1, 170 n. 22 172 n. 20
Rossellini, Isabella, 47, 56, 173 n. 23 Solid Mandala, The, see White, Patrick
Rosset, Clément, 2, 179 n. 18 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 135
Rossner, Judith, 173 n. 1 stagnation of twin relation, xiv, 24–5,
Roy, Arundhati, 4, 18 30, 31, 35, 40, 42, 45, 48, 120,
Rubin, Gayle, 42 126, 129
Rushdie, Salman, 119 Steal Big Steal Little, 53, 119, 147
Russell, David J., 78 Steel, Danielle, 4, 171 n. 6
stereotypes, see clichés; parody
sameness Stevenson, Robert Louis, 3, 11
and difference, xv, xvi, 5, 14, 22, Stewart, Elizabeth A., 10, 158, 175 n.
28–9, 43, 45–6, 90, 91, 95, 2, 176 n. 8, 178 n. 8
116–18, 121, 136, 140, 164, 170 Stolen Life, A, 47, 50
n. 22, n. 25 Strauss, Darin, 115–16, 173 n. 1
see also resemblance; repetition Stuck On You, 175 n. 13
Saul, John Ralston, 116 synthesis, dialectical
Schwartz, Hillel, 9, 15–16, 91, 93, of differences, xv, 29, 164
157, 175–6 n. 3 of twin identities, 31, 33–4, 51–2,
Sedgwick, Eve, 41–2, 54, 64, 94, 96 122, 133–5, 155, 157, 179 n. 13
separation of twins
attempts to separate from twin, 33, Take Two, 49, 54, 172 n. 16
36, 39, 70, 124, 127, 129, 133, Thicker Than Water, 48
174 n. 8 Third Walker, The, 119, 171 n. 3, 178
of conjoined twins, 70–7, 79, 80, n. 3
84, 85–6, 116, 173 n.1, 174 n.6, This World Then the Fireworks, 49
175 n. 13 Thompson, Alice, 171 n. 6
separation anxiety, 79, 129 Thompson, Charles J. S., 78
separated by border, 114, 116–18, time, narrative, 21, 27, 32–3, 35–6,
136, 161–2 39, 40–1, 42, 43, 44–5, 170 n. 20
see also twins, raised apart; twins, Tolstoy, Leo, 54–5, 57, 61–2, 66
reunited topos, see genre and topos
Serres, Michel, 32 Tournier, Michel, xiii, xv, 1–2, 8,
sexuality, xvi, 3, 5, 6, 28–9, 98–106, 27–8, 29–30, 31–4, 42, 43, 45, 169
145, 177 n. 14 n. 9, n. 12, 170 n. 18, 179 n. 13
contemporary preoccupation with, Troubetzkoy, Wladimir, 13, 139, 141
xviii, 163–4 Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 24
female, see virgin/whore dichotomy Twain, Mark, 27, 119, 173 n. 1
198 Index
twin brothers in literature, lack of, xv, 17, 49,

in films, xv–xvi, xvii, 48–9, 52–4, 169 n. 10
55, 64, 117, 145, 146, 148, in novels, xvii, 117–18, 120–34,
171 n. 3 159, 169 n. 8, 171 n. 6
in horror films, 68–9, 79, 81, 83 see also genre and gender;
in novels, xv, xvi, 7, 23, 27–8, 98, virgin/whore dichotomy
118, 169 n. 10 Twin Sisters (Berry), 48, 51, 169,
see also genre and gender; legends 171 n. 11
see also under individual titles and Twin Sisters (De Tweeling), 171 n. 4
authors Twins of Evil, 47
Twin Dragons, 4, 48, 53, 175 n. 1 twin studies, xvi, 6, 89–97, 107,
Twin Falls Idaho, xvi, 4, 6, 69, 81, 112–13
83–8, 163, 171 n. 3, 174 n. 7 binarism of, 90–4
twins Tymms, Ralph V., 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 24,
as couple, xv, 5, 5, 10, 18, 22, 23, 137, 153
24–35, 40, 46, 84–5, 163,
171 n. 3 Underhill, Steven, 177 n. 11
genetic studies of, see twin studies
good/evil, xv, 24, 47, 49–54, 56, vanishing twin syndrome, 93, 176 n. 6
61, 62, 64–5, 81, 163, 169 n. 7, virgin/whore dichotomy, xv, 5, 7, 48,
174 n. 6 49–52, 55, 57, 59, 64–7, 69, 106,
longevity of, 21–3, 30, 34, 35, 44–5, 146, 163–4, 165, 171 n. 6, 172 n.
159, 169 n. 8, 170 n. 24 12, n. 19, 173 n. 2, 174 n. 9, 178
oocytic, 174 n. 10, 176 n. 5 n. 7
raised apart, 48, 93–5, 98, 116–17,
146, 176 n. 8, 177 n. 12, 178 Wallace, Marjorie, 25–6
n. 3 Whalerider, 176 n. 3
relation mediated by third party, White, Patrick, xv, 27–8, 29–32, 42,
39–43, 70, 72–3, 83 43, 45, 169 n. 11
reunited, xvi, 22, 48, 89, 97–9, 112, Wolfenstein, Martha and Leites,
114, 116–18, 146, 175 n. 1 Nathan, 52, 65, 172 n. 16
and singletons, 93, 176 n. 6 Wright, Lawrence, 89, 91–4, 95, 97,
as soul-mates, xiv, 18, 21, 24, 48, 98
85
see also conjoined; identical; X-Files, The, xv, 69, 74–7, 82, 85, 174
legends; mixed sex; opposites; n. 7
non-identical; rivalry;
separation Zazzo, René, 10, 11, 17–18, 23, 48, 49,
Twins (with Schwarzenegger, de Vito), 114–15, 169 n. 12, 170 n. 18, n.
xvii, 29, 48, 49, 53, 146–7 24, 171 n. 3
Twins in Black and White, 119 Zed and Two Noughts, A, 25, 27, 41–2,
twin sisters 48, 49, 68, 145, 171 n. 3, 174–5
in films, xv, 5, 7, 17, 47–52, 54–5, n. 11
58, 64–6, 69, 87, 171 n. 4 Žižek, Slavoj, 178 n. 6

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Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Also by Juliana de Nooy

DERRIDA, KRISTEVA, AND THE DIVIDING LINE

1. Twins in literature. 2. Fiction–20th century–History and criticism.

1 Look Twice: Narrative Uses of Twins 1

2 Twins and The Couple: Surviving Sameness in Novels 21

3 Twins and Sexual Rivalry: Recasting the Wicked Sister 47

Lies of the Twins: a role reversal 55

4 Twins and the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’: Patterns in Body 68

5 Twins and the ‘Gay Gene’ Debate: When Queer Comic 89

6 Twins and Nations: Tales of Cultural Divides 114

7 Twins as Doubtful Doubles: Postmodern Identity, 137

The shadow of a doubt: postmodern fiction 139

8 Conclusion: Twins and Problems of Representation 158

Figure 3.1 Aidan Quinn plays Jonathan and James McEwan 63

This project has spanned several institutional affiliations. It would

Finally, I would like to thank the following for granting permis-

identities, conjoined twins in the horror genre provide an ideal oppor-

problematic in a postcolonial world of hybrid identities and multi-

At first glance: a profusion of twin tales, a multitude of

A myth is a story that everyone already knows. When I was writing

At once my interlocutor’s face would light up. Twin brothers? As a

If Tournier’s point is that a myth is a story that is always already

I once knew two twin brothers, both of whom were endowed

The anecdote appears in a footnote to one of Freud’s case studies. The

acquires meanings particular to times and places. If cutting off one’s

A closer look: family resemblances

Amidst this apparently infinite variety, however, insistent patterns

contemporary culture emerge. A set of late twentieth-century novels

The book examines the tensions played out in contemporary narra-

Genre and gender: twinned constraints

pressure on these familiar nexuses of genre, gender and topos to

invoking and explicitly distancing themselves from neighbouring

Looking back: existing studies of twins and doubles

Important studies of twins and doubles in myth and literature,

their usefulness, in some cases their limitations, and the ways in

postmodern American fiction (1993), twentieth-century doubles have

The double in decline

of the double theme into comparative triviality’ at the close of the

advocates in literature […] and is generally regarded, with some

Happily, Gordon Slethaug’s The Play of the Double in Postmodern

Not a trifling matter

culture, that it is at the root of ‘our most perplexing moral dilemmas’

Convergences of genre and gender

periods in which non-identical and identical twins appear: ‘To find

my study presupposes neither a single twins myth open to reworking

Far from having merely declined from a nineteenth-century Dostoevskian

an understanding of what is at stake in twin tales that depart from

The Bloomfield’s closed circle

children and grew up in decaying splendour in one of Hobart’s stately

The wages of twins

Stories about twins appear short on survivors. From Romulus and

twins and doubles are often outwardly identical, but diametrically –

This is not death by opposition but death by a suffocating sameness,

to indefinite confinement in Broadmoor prison hospital.7 A 1994 post-

Although from different national cultures, White, Tournier and

The question of negotiating resemblance within a couple (or a

Patrick White: Arthur, Waldo and the marbles

brother, but a oneness that is much more inclusive than narcissistic