The Doppelgänger and Women's Image in Cinema

The theme of doubling is ancient and can be found in primitive rituals and superstition’s such as twins being killed out of fear of embodying evil spirits. The myth of Narcissus is another example. Another word for a double is doppelganger. It is shown as an ethereal being, a shadow, a reflection, or an animated portrait. In general, the concept of doubling has been read as “a symbolic discourse of expressing psychic conflicts wherein dual characters represent facets of the unified self.” In the Literature of the Second Self, it is construed that “oppositeness is the main link that unites (them), for it is the complementarity oppositeness of the two halves of the being whom they compromise, a being sometimes suggesting the total human personality.”

The films of this genre largely came out during the World War II era focusing on female identical twins played as the same actress. A theory behind this is that women during this time were alone on the home front and left alone to perform unfeminine jobs in factories. Michael Renov said that women were driven to a form of “schizophrenia” during this era because women were torn between social pressures to take the place of men and yet remain attractive for their return. A female double in this period would seem to have cultural determinants – since women’s persona was seen as divided and its aspects as mutually – exclusive.

There seems to be a significant difference between male and female “doubling”. Men are considered to be more doppelgangers and women are twins. Men are not always at odds with their doppelganger, but women always are over a potential love interest. Males can be portrayed as both positive with good characteristics, but female twins are always separated by “evil” and “good”. One twin represents the ideal feminine characteristics, and the other female represents masculine characteristics which makes her unfeminine and always the villain. The problems the twins face are almost always derived from some spoken or unspoken childhood trauma and they undergo some symbolic exchange of identity which leads to one sibling’s symbolic death and to the others’ real demise.

Simone de Beauvoir speaks of women as having a “double and deceptive visage” in her feminist manifesto The Second Sex. This is not because of her essential nature, but because of the contradictory expectations with which she is viewed by men. She states:

“There is no figurative image of women which does not call up at once its opposite: she is Life and Death, Nature and Artifice, Daylight and Night. Under whatever aspect we consider her, we always find the same shifting back and forth…”

Robert Rogers devotes an entire chapter about this opposition in his book. Rogers sees the female derived from the male’s ambivalent attitude towards the other and notes how easily women are dichotomized through polarities such as: Good girl/bad girl, Virgin/whore, saintly/witch etc. Thus, the narratives do not seem to depict battles between good as evil as much as they do the psychic struggles between alleged “masculine and “feminine” lobes of the female consciousness. Freud begs us to ask this line of thought: What are the predetermined crystalline social structures that have caused the women to break in this particular manner?

If the dichotomy of masculine and femineity are aspects taken away from the table, what then are we left with? Surely a woman would disagree that she embodies only feminine or only masculine qualities and would instead embody a fully formed individual capable of a spectrum of identification…. The question then becomes not a split between these two alternating and isolating dichotomies or a psychological break in the psyche of women but instead more aptly seen as a cleft of the male’s dominated view of her. When viewed from this oppositional reading, it becomes clear that the twin allegory becomes a signification of the male consciousness in “drag.” Johnson has indicated that “within a sexist ideology and male-dominated cinema, women are presented as what she represents for man.

Freud’s own analysis of women can be seen as problematic and shifting between the polarities of masculinity and femininity which he conceptualizes begins in early childhood when a young girl must make a unique and traumatic switch of allegiance from mother to father. This transfer of love imbues the child with hostility towards her own sex. Dr. Elliot claims that this makes “all women” fundamental rivals. However alternative ways to read women’s situation other than the manner in which Dr. Freud or Dr. Elliot would paint. Luce Irigarayan sees female erogeny as diverse but cohere, multiply contained within the boundaries of the feminine. This is contrasted starkly to Freud’s masculine and feminine erogenous zones. The clitoris being phallic while the vaginal canal being feminine and passive. Hence, the Freudian narrative for female sexual maturation can be seen not as a real developmental blueprint but rather as a fictional scenario or a projection of male consciousness onto women’s body and mind.

Indeed, women are closer to the element of doubling then men will ever through the act of childbirth. In the possibility of pregnancy, a second self is created within the primary being. Thus, the double figure in literature and on screen may ultimately be based on a primal suppression of woman’s birth function – perhaps the only natural sphere of the doppelganger drama. So, it is no surprise that when female alter-egos do appear they are denied associate with the specifically feminine possibilities of doubling, and instead are split falsely into warring “masculine” and “feminine” roles. Women are thereby driven in these narratives to hysteria that Freud predicted.

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