The Wilson Duplex: Corporatism and the Problem of Singleton Reading in Poe’s “William Wilson” (or, Why Can’t You See Twins?)

The Wilson Duplex: Corporatism and the Problem of Singleton Reading in Poe’s “William Wilson” (or, Why Can’t You See Twins?) LYNN LANGMADE I n June 2003, the Funk Family of Chicago went to China to adopt a baby girl who had been abandoned outside a textile factory in Yangzhou amid the buzz of streaming cars only hours after birth. They named her Mia. In 2004, the Ramirez family of Miami also adopted a baby girl from China found abandoned outside the same factory in Yangzhou one week later. As it happened, the Ramirez family also named their baby Mia. But it wasn’t until August 2006 when Diana Ramirez placed an advertisement on an international orphanage Web site about the upcoming birthday party of her three-year-old daughter that these two families collided. Holly Funk, who just happened to be surfing the orphanage’s Web site on the day Ms. Ramirez’s advertisement went up, put two and two together and wrote back: “Diana, I have a Mia as well and she is almost 3.”1 After emails and photos had been exchanged and DNA tests completed, Ms. Ramirez and Ms. Funk came to the shocking, yet inevitable, conclusion that their daughters—Mia and Mia—who lived fourteen hundred miles apart and over twelve thousand miles from their birth country— were twin sisters.2 The families quickly arranged a meeting between Mia and Mia and discovered that, although they had spent the first three years of their lives apart, the twins shared a remarkable number of personality traits beyond their identical names and appearance. Such similarity coupled with the twins’ reunion is, according to Mia Funk’s adoptive father, nothing short of a miracle: “‘What are the odds that of all the people in China these two are sisters? What are the chances of the two of them . . . [finding] each other? It’s amazing.’”3 But more importantly, this case illustrates the way twins, who appear poised to live their entire lives apart, are often reunited by deceptively simple means, such as a Web site advertisement—pulled back together by a far more powerful force than the culture, time, and space separating them. Though the happy ending to the Mia Twins’ story would have been unthinkable without the technological advancement of the Internet, it is actually just a modern installment of a very old tale: twins separated at birth miraculously reunite by chance or fate and discover eerie similarities. But it’s C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 45, 2012 5 L Y N N L A N G M A D E a tale psychologists did not take seriously until T. J. Bouchard published his groundbreaking Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA) in 1990, which conclusively documented the similarities of real twins who had been separated at birth.4 The MISTRA study made the Jim Twins (Jim Lewis and Jim Springer), who were reunited thirty-nine years after being separated at four weeks, world renowned. The study documented that both men were gifted in math, struggled with spelling, enjoyed mechanical drawing and carpentry, had first wives named Linda and second wives named Betty, named their sons James Allan and their dog Toy. Not too coincidentally, Lewis and Springer also developed headaches at the same time of day, drove the same color and model of Chevrolet, chain-smoked Salem cigarettes, bit their fingernails, and vacationed in the same spot each year.5 Separated twins, as these brothers demonstrate, may not only reunite quite unexpectedly under bizarre circumstances but also lead, inexplicably, “twin” lives. This archetypical tale of twins reared apart, which has spawned an entire mythic lore about multiples, is also crucial for delineating a classic problem in the exegesis of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most critically acclaimed short stories, “William Wilson.” Critics, such as Daniel Hoffman, who typically regard the story as a masterpiece in the genre of the “double,” have almost universally assumed the story is about a second or “divided self” that “haunts the protagonist and leads him to insanity.”6 This more generalized reading of the story begins with D...