Nicola Healey

I was drawn to William Viney’s cultural exploration of twins as I’m an identical twin myself. The twin figure is often idealised or objectified in culture, the writer projecting onto them what twins symbolise or suggest to non-twins, rather than showing what they just are from the inside out: two humans, albeit uniquely bonded. The great strength of Twinkind is that Viney is also an identical twin himself: his book is illuminated by the ‘twinsights’ that can only come from lifelong experience of being a twin.

The term ‘identical twins’ is really a misnomer as identical twins are not 100% genetically identical (they are not clones), and their characters, personalities and spirits – their beings – are of course separate. ‘They, too, are singular,’ Viney writes. ‘And yet there is a stubborn and persistent relationship between twins: sameness, enduring intimacy and expected cooperation.’ Viney’s exhaustive and detailed study, encompassing the uses of twins in myth, literature, art and science, searches for ‘how twins fulfil and defy these and other expectations’.

I don’t really think about the fact that I’m a twin these days, but when my sister and I were growing up, it was at the forefront of our experience of living, often a source of friction and unease: we were usually treated as one unit by the outside world rather than as separate individuals. In order to differentiate between the two of you, people tend to focus on twins’ appearance – and verbalise their observations – in a way which would be deemed intrusive and uncomfortable to non-twins. As Taiye Selasi (a twin) writes in ‘Betwixt and Betwin’, people seem to think they have permission to ‘[scan] your bodies in a manner that anyone would otherwise find inappropriate. As if playing a game. As if, moreover, you have asked them to play’ (Granta 161, November 2022). ‘Sisters’, Selasi writes, ‘are compared, twins are studied.’

Viney (William) and Viney (George) still experience this observation: ‘as twins we are a thing to look at and scrutinise. In our middle age, my brother and I remain aware of the spontaneous smile of recognition on the face of a passer-by. Some people are compelled to stare.’ This fleeting outside interest is an abiding curiosity to twins themselves: ‘twins are always learning about what your curiosity looks like’, Viney remarks.

While twins are highly visible, they can feel, as individuals, invisible. ‘When you grow up in rural England in the 1980s and 1990s, ’ Viney writes:
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Everyone knows who you are. Unless you are twins. Then you are an indistinguishable oddity, a known unknown. Anonymity can be a pleasure, unless it is forced on you. Yet even our anonymity was shared and, therefore, incomplete.

Viney’s perception echoes Juliet Mitchell’s remark in Siblings (Polity Press, 2003) that ‘One could even argue that at the beginning of life a twin […] “is not alone, but not actively with anyone”.’ I rarely heard my own name spoken outside the nuclear family – if people are not sure ‘which is which’, they don’t hazard a name; we were often referred to as ‘the Healey twins’. You begin to feel you are not there, not a person as valid as everyone else; it was as if we cancelled each other out. I remember when I was at university without my sister around, it was a shock to hear my name spoken regularly, an affirmation of being that must be taken for granted by most people throughout their life. The one thing you can do if you know twins is to make the effort to distinguish between their beings – they will remember it always if you do.

Every twin’s experience is different, so Viney doesn’t claim to speak for all twins, just as I don’t. Some twins ‘own’ their twinness, taking a sort of pride and refuge in it as something special, especially if they feel ostracised from others. I may have done this at times, but I grew to feel it is better for twins to assert their independences as much as possible; if they don’t, they are more likely to be othered by people who seem unable to discern their separate humanities, and thus marginalised.

Historically, society has pushed twin separation unnaturally far. Viney recounts how, in the 1950s and 1960s, psychologists feared that if twins ‘fail to distinguish themselves from each other’, it would lead to a ‘diffusion of ego boundaries between the two individuals’, a blurring of being. The psychiatrist Peter Neubauer used twins in a now infamous, unethical study that separated adopted infant twins (cruelly, without their or their adopted parents’ knowledge that they were twins), colonising their twin space, later arguing ‘it was “the belief of the time” that being a twin was handicapping’ socially. ‘We protected our own paths,’ George Viney writes in the foreword to his brother’s book (this is a nice touch that we hear his discrete voice here).

I’m glad I’m a twin in some ways (though I don’t know anything different), but I don’t think it’s the most relevant thing about me; it is incidental, an accident of birth, like the colour of one’s hair. Perhaps I have twin fatigue. I am not, as Viney admits he became during his research, ‘profoundly interested in the experience of being a twin’; I am more like Viney’s previous self: ‘It was mundane and disenchanting to me – rarely an advantage and often a source of frustration’. That said, I can understand other people’s curiosity – when I see twins in the street, I too have stared, but it’s more because I feel a distant affinity (similar to when you encounter fellow school or university alumni), sensing I somehow share part of their past, and wonder in that passing moment how much their lives have been like mine; how have they managed personhood within twinhood?

I don’t think I look much like my twin anymore, so I’m often surprised when strangers ask if we are twins. We also couldn’t be more different in our interests and abilities, which have diverged as we’ve got older. It is strange to look at childhood photos, though, in which even we struggle to identify ourselves, a challenge Peter Wallis describes in his recent poetry collection, Half Other (The Hippocrates Press, 2023): in the poem ‘Identical’, he finds ‘we’re lost to ourselves’. There’s ‘not a single photo of a twin on his own’.

Twins embody a concentration of siblingship – and so provoke memories of childhood – a relationship that is often overlooked in adulthood and culture, as if we wish to outgrow that bond, leave it behind us. This is odd, given that for many of us the sibling relationship will be the longest of our lives. Nevertheless, as Sigrid Rausing writes, ‘If, from the point of view of evolution, partners survive by supporting each other, siblings survive by rejecting each other, and striking out on their own.’ (Granta 161, November 2022). This dynamic of individuation is more complicated with twins though, where there isn’t the usual sibling rivalry (in my experience – George Viney suggests otherwise), the relationship being more defined by equality and closeness than competition: the twin wants to strike out on their own, but faces more barriers, inner and outer, in doing so.

I was most moved and absorbed by Viney’s account of conjoined twins, a ‘deviation’ within even twins, and for whom individuation is obviously far more complicated. In pre-modern times, he notes, they and their mothers had very high mortality rates – ‘They were considered monsters, prodigious signs.’ I was appalled to learn that twins have been ‘ritually abandoned’ or suffered infanticide into the 19th and even 20th centuries across the world, innocent casualties of ‘fears that twins are abnormal, kill the sick, pollute or damage livestock and crops, arise from adultery, are cursed and embody evil’, among other reasons. Though twins were ‘saved’ at Auschwitz, they were horrifyingly experimented on by Josef Mengele (with one twin being used as a control), during which human vivisection many died; this section is painful to read. Whatever difficulties twins face in the present day, what our twin predecessors have gone through is unfathomable. ‘Twins may fascinate’ now, Viney writes, ‘but it is only because humans put them at the edge of human power, reason and control’, and have done so throughout history. This potently imbalanced, unstable power dynamic, between twins and non-twins, is the dark seam that glimmers with interest throughout this book.

Twinkind shows how twins have been used in literature, photography and film as objects of entertainment, a plot device or ‘to unnerve and terrify viewers’, often playing to what the author thinks a non-twin audience expects or wants, which lacks nuance and depth. Shallow twin tropes and offensive caricatures perpetuate the stereotype that twins are somehow spooky freaks of nature. The ‘good twin/bad twin dichotomy’, for example, encourages viewing twins through a split-personality, Jekyll- and-Hyde lens, rather than as two people. Viney is particularly good on these tired clichés and distortions. Such exaggerated portrayals reveal ‘the changing assumptions and desires that the single-born majority have for twins and for themselves’. This pinpoints the paradox that twins present, viewed as ‘a community in miniature’ (this reminded me of Patrick Brontë observing that his isolated children had formed ‘a little society’): non-twins often perceive twins as at once an enviable consolidation of, or addition to, self; ever-present friends; and as a discomfiting threat to the very notion of the individual self. ‘Western psychologies of twin people,’ Viney finds, ‘are frequently underpinned by a fear of twinship’, a fear of the unknown.

One strange twin thing (that exasperates my sister) is that I will occasionally recall something in our distant family lore that I feel happened to me, but she’ll say it happened to her. In the fascinating chapter ‘Twins and the Paranormal’, Viney explores ‘parapsychological twin experiences’ and this ‘strange power of twins to share each other’s thoughts’ and feelings. Some of the stories he relays of so-called ‘twin telepathy’, ‘extrasensory perception’, sympathetic pain and coincidences of behaviour are remarkable and very eerie. He notes after one such story that scientists concluded that ‘younger twins in their home environment might be more likely to connect telepathically’, with their sensitive growing brains. Generally, though, scientists discredit such phenomena, as what they can’t prove is a threat to their objective expertise – their power. ‘Scientific expertise is asserted at the expense of twins and their lived experience,’ Viney finds. He argues that ‘Twin connections might be guarded by scientists for the risk they pose to a professional monopoly over twins and twinning.’ Thus, the twin’s knowledge is quashed by the scientist’s. I am more interested in what a twin has to say about being a twin than what a scientist observes.

Importantly, Viney notes that ‘Twins are often treated as two persons that occupy the social position of one being,’ as if they are each half of a being. ‘Perhaps it’s time,’ Jude Cook writes in reviewing Twinkind in The Spectator (himself a twin), ‘that their unique individual experience of being in the world was acknowledged too.’ This is a variety of people ‘whose views and opinions about being twins are rarely heard’, Viney points out. Indeed, Viney’s book could have incorporated such subjective views, perhaps via some interviews with twins – I would have found that very interesting and it would tell us more about interior twinhoods (as opposed to cultural representations of twindom). I wonder how much twin security varies according to gender, for instance; I suspect female twins endure different conflicts (he touches on ‘callous and opportunistic’ exploitation of early-20th-century twin dancers and performers, for example). It would also be interesting to consider how twin experience intersects with factors such as disability or race. ‘The personal is also political for twin people, but in ways that have not formed part of a social movement,’ Viney remarks, such as campaigns for ‘racial, gender, sexual and disability justice’. This is a very incisive, rarely ventured point: there are individuals who don’t fall under these categories who experience complex, hidden injustice too.

Depth in various areas is inevitably sacrificed where there is such encyclopaedic breadth in one book, but Twinkind is undoubtedly a valuable, dazzlingly thorough contribution to twin studies and impressively researched. I am not keen on the strong visual element of the book – it is packed with illustrations, every other page and more; I found this distracting and dominating. Ironically, it also encourages concentration on twins’ appearance, and risks playing into twin stereotypes, which Viney’s writing itself goes to great lengths to successfully counter.

One of the first questions twins tend to be asked, George Viney remarks, is whether they have played tricks on people by impersonating their twin. The only time I have (inadvertently) pretended I was my sister was when I was once staying at her house and the postman came to the door while she was at work; I gradually realised he assumed I was her. Caught unawares, I didn’t know how to correct his mis-impression in seconds – what could I have said, ‘I’m not who you think I am, if that’s what you’re thinking?’ – so I just went along with it. It felt like an out-of-body experience, one which I wouldn’t want to repeat. So I smiled at these lines in Tom Bailey’s recent poem: ‘The dead twin and I are housemates now’ (Poetry News, Spring 2023): ‘The postman thinks / we’re the same person, and we feel no need to correct him.’ Perhaps I haunt my sister’s life, even though I am alive.

Lawrence Wright, quoted in Viney’s book, observes that ‘twins pose questions we might not think to ask if we lived without them … their mere existence allows us to test certain ideas about how we are the way we are.’ Far from posing a threat to human uniqueness, twins – whose lives are naturally unfolding living experiments in what makes any of us ‘us’ – show that there is a powerful element of identity and life formation that is mysterious and self-governing. In terms of nature versus nurture, subtle environmental differences begin in the shared womb (which is why even identical twins do not have the same fingerprints). Identical twins prove that you can have generally the same genes, the same upbringing, the same education and social environment, but still end up very different people. I find this reassuring: it leaves room for the unknown and what is immeasurable, random and uncontrollable by science; it leaves room for the spirit, privacy, luck and agency. It gently proves that identity and character are fundamentally forged by the individual’s mind and make-up, their personality traits interacting with the infinitely complex and various pressures, relationships and influences that arise in a person’s specific worldhood, a psychic and bodily sphere which no two individuals entirely share, or respond to, in the same way as they go through life, moment to moment – not even identical twins.

 

Nicola Healey’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Hopkins Review, Magma, Wild Court and elsewhere. Her first poetry pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, was published by Dare-Gale Press in April 2024 and won the Michael Marks Poetry Award.