“Twins are common enough to be familiar to all, but scarce enough to remain a curiosity,” writes George Viney in the foreword to Twinkind: The Singular Significance of Twins (Princeton University Press, 2024), a broad visual and cultural survey on the titular subject written by his twin brother, William Viney. If his insider perspective on twins weren’t enough, William Viney is also the author of a second (twin?) book about twins, Twins: Superstitions and Marvels, Fantasies and Experiments (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and director of the short documentary film “Twins on Twins” (2017). Clearly, the nature of twinkind is more than a birthright for the elder (by roughly 12 minutes) Viney; it is an enduring obsession.
Viney is not alone in this. As his brother notes, twins are a phenomenon that has held cultural cachet throughout human history. Twins are seen as endlessly compelling — though they’re not always viewed in a positive light. In their visual similarity, twins complicate the baseline assumption that everyone is unique (this becomes even more complicated if the twins remain physically conjoined); in their genetic similarity, identical twins historically proved irresistible subjects for scientific and social experimentation (of a dubious ethical nature); in the potential for identity switching, twins carry the threat of deception, or at least hijinks, from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors to the films The Parent Trap (1961) and the much more disturbing Dead Ringers(1987). Viney’s latest tribute to twins presents material under three sections: Myth + Legend, Science + Progress, and Spectacle + Prophecy. The first section is further divided into chapters on twin myths and legends of three types: gods and heroes, evil twins, and twin spirits. As early as 1200 BCE, the tomb of Nefertiti is depicted as twinned with Isis, the goddess of healing, cementing the status of Egyptian royalty as being directly descended from gods. Castor and Pollux, stars of Greek mythology, are twins produced from their mother Leda’s romantic liaison with a swan. Twins appear in Eastern mythology, from the Ashvins in a Vedic Sanskrit text called the Harivashma to Lava and Kusha, twin sons of Rama and Sita, from Hindu mythology. Of course twins have not always been seen as heroes; the “Evil Twins” chapter highlights twin cults and, horrifically, twin sacrifice — whether religiously motivated or driven by a scientific desire to separate babies conjoined at birth.
Twins in history and science by Luigi Gedda, published in 1961 by Springfield, Ill.,: C. C. Thomas (image courtesy University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries)
Science + Progress likewise reflects on three sub-categories: nature and nurture, crime and forensics, and born and made. The genetic similarity of twins (and other multiples) makes them especially desirable test subjects to explore contributing factors of conditions such as mental illness, but also to produce “heritability scores” for behaviors and decisions like nail-biting, divorce, dog ownership, voting choices, criminality, and sexual orientation. This portion of the book tracks the history of twin study and scholarship in the scientific community, some of which has revealed stories of twins unknowingly separated at birth and making uncannily parallel life choices.
The final section analyzes the spectacle of twins, from their participation as entertainers in circus and variety shows to their roles in cinema. Twins maybe be presented for aesthetic effect, as with the famously unsettling pair in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), as plot devices (providing at least one lazy reveal for every single CSI-based forensic procedural in the history of the genre), or as a metaphor for two different people who wear the same face, from Errol Flynn’s The Prince and the Pauper (1937) to Bette Davis’s dual role in A Stolen Life (1946), to, arguably, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). The secret life of doubles is rich fodder for storytelling, as Viney’s compendium thoroughly demonstrates.
The Shining, 1980 (courtesy AJ Pics/Alamy Stock Photo)
Chang & Eng in evening dress, color wood engraving by H.S. Miller. These conjoined-twins are the original Siamese twins, from whom the name derives (courtesy Wellcome Collection, London)
San Francisco’s most famous twins, Marian (left) and Vivian Brown, photographed in the 1990s, enjoy afternoon tea (photo Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.)
Twins in history and science by Luigi Gedda, published in 1961 by Springfield, Ill., C. C. Thomas (University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries)
Noga Shtainer, “Marcos and Maurcious” (2010), part of the Duo Mortality series; these identical twins were born in CĂ¢ndido GĂ³doi, Brazil, a village with an inexplicably high twin birth rate
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