Twin Worship II: Romanticism and its Obsession with Twincest
At the end of Part One, I mentioned the concept of ‘universal Disocurism’, which is ‘a tendency throughout the world to use, think about and venerate twins’. In earlier times, this took the form of overt twin worship (as we saw in Part One). But more recently, this tendency has been channelled into art. A good example of this is the Dioscurism in the Romantic movement which peaked in the first half of the nineteenth century, but continues to exert its influence on us today.
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae does a good job charting the Dioscuric theme in Romanticism, which she places alongside the other High Romantic motifs; i.e. ‘cruelty, sexual ambiguity, narcissism, fascination, obsession, vampirism, seduction, violation’.
For the Romantics, the twin is a source of inspiration — a muse, or alter-ego. In most cases, this takes the form of a cross twin (a twin of different sex) as opposed to a parallel twin (a twin of like sex). Thus, for a man, his twin is his anima, his female spirit, which Jung describes as ‘the woman within’.
The anima inhabits the psyche, but often it is projected out onto a specific person. Similarly, the Romantic twin is rarely an actual twin, but rather a sister, a wife or even imaginary apparition. In the case of Goethe, his twin-Muse was his sister Cornelia:
[Goethe’s] principal relationship was with his sister Cornelia, a year younger and his only real childhood friend. His imaginative connection to her was like Tennessee Williams’ to his mad sister, Rose. In his memoirs, Goethe speaks of Cornelia as his twin. She was his Romantic alter ego, what Jung would call his anima, a sister-Muse. Cornelia died at twenty-six, soon after her marriage. Did she fail after separation from her twin? Goethe’s sister-fixation is evident throughout his love affairs. In letters and poems he uses the word “sister” for lover or wife. Goethe’s many androgynes may represent a condensed incestuous twinship (Paglia)
Lord Byron, however, took the concept of the sister-muse much further. He and his half-sister, Augusta, were engaged in an incestuous affair, which resulted in Byron’s exile from England in 1814. As Paglia says, ‘Byron makes Romantic incest stunningly explicit’. In his poem Manfred (1817):
[His] passionate hero is tormented by guilt for some mysterious crime. He is obsessed with his dead sister Astarte, his twin in eyes, face, and voice. Byron relishes sexual criminality. Forbidden love makes his characters superhuman. Rejecting all social relationships, Manfred seeks only himself in sexually transmuted form. Wordsworth’s sister allows him to remain alone, sex-free, but Astarte (Phoenician Venus) lures Manfred into the vertigo of sex (Paglia)
Astarte is Manfred’s anima. They are identical apart from her feminine charms (‘them gentler powers’):
She was like me in lineaments — her eyes —
Her hair — her features — all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But softened all, and tempered into beauty:
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the Universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears — which I had not;
And tenderness — but that I had for her;
Humility — and that I never had.
Her faults were mine — her virtues were her own —
I loved her, and destroyed her! (Byron)
Paglia also identifies this ‘longing for twinship’ in Shelley — who says something in us from birth ‘thirsts after its likeness’ and that incest is, ‘like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance’. Paglia also mentions the Late Romantic Oscar Wilde (with Dorian Gray) and, of course, Emily Brontë, whose novel Wuthering Heights is the quintessential narcissistic love story. Of the novel’s protagonists, Catherine and Heathcliff, one commentator wrote that: ‘He and she are, so to speak, but a single person; together they form a hybrid monster, twin-sexed and twin-souled; he is the male soul of the monster, she the female’ (Montégut).
Paglia says that no one has fully explained the Romantic fascination with incest, but that she sees it as a product of a crisis in sex roles.
I see Romanticism’s obsession with twincest as a continuation of the twin worship observed in ancient traditions. There are several creation myths in which cross twins come together and thus bring the world into existence (Plutarch says Isis and Osiris ‘copulated in the womb’ in prenatal union). Even in Christianity, there is the thorny issue of the second generation. Byron’s poem Cain is an exploration of this strange double standard: ‘The poem dwells on the mutual love of Cain and his twin sister, incredulous at the prohibition of fraternal sexuality to their own children’ (Paglia).
The twin deities that create the cosmos and the ‘twin-souled’ Romantics that create great art share in the potent symbolism of twinship—further proof of universal Dioscurism.
