The New Yorker:

From Romulus and Remus to Mary-Kate and Ashley, multiples loom large in our cultural and historical imaginations.

By Parul Sehgal

Half a century later, they still return our gaze, staring back at us in their dark dresses and white stockings, their white headbands pinned in place. The seven-year-old identical twins Cathleen and Colleen Wade stand side by side, pressed together as if to create the illusion that they are conjoined. One twin smiles; the other appraises the photographer. There are remnants of chocolate cake in the creases of their mouths.

Diane Arbus took this portrait, “Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1966,” at a Christmas party for families of multiples held at a Knights of Columbus hall. She’d been lurking at such events, prospecting for twins and triplets. Through her viewfinder, the sisters appear less like two separate children than like split aspects of the same soul, simultaneously innocent and foreboding. “I mean, it resembles them,” their father told a reporter at a 2005 retrospective of Arbus’s work. “But we’ve always been baffled that she made them look ghostly. None of the other pictures we have of them looks anything like this.” The photograph reportedly inspired Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of the eerie sisters in “The Shining.”

In “How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins” (Bloomsbury), Helena de Bres aims to rescue twins from the gothic, from horror movies, and from singleton scrutiny, the better to return our gaze and testify to the experience of twindom from the inside out. De Bres invokes twins from life and legend—the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker; Tweedledum and Tweedledee; her own identical twin and herself—to examine how multiples complicate our notions of personhood, attachment, and agency. Twins have been critical to our understanding of ourselves, she argues; they are present in the founding myths of great cities. Romulus and Remus gave us Rome. The twins of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, Lava and Kusha, established Lahore and Kasur. Twins have been worshipped, killed at birth, paraded as curiosities, pricked and probed and experimented on. They have been treated as subhuman and superhuman, and seen to personify every possible duality: collaboration and bitter competition, the purest as well as the most morbidly enmeshed forms of love. And they continue to unsettle our notions about where bodies end and begin, about whether personalities, even fates, are forged or found.

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