Helena de Bres
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Twins in Wonderland
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The author’s favorite picture of twins is John Tenniel’s illustration of Tweedledum and Tweedledee for Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The scene deftly captures three core aspects of identical twinhood. For one thing, it features two people who look strikingly alike. Much of the experience of twinhood is determined not by twinship itself but the response of non-twins to it. Tweedledum and Tweedledee live in Wonderland, a place peopled by the odd, unpredictable, seductive, and unhinged. Twins vividly breach some of the central physical, cognitive, and emotional boundaries we assume hold between individual people. One reason twins seem unusually interconnected is the intense emotional bond they often share. The social role of the traditional freak show, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has argued, was to reassure audiences of their own normality, beauty, and virtue.

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How to Be Multiple

The Philosophy of Twins

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