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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications The Evil Twins of American Television
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    • The Tulip-Flame
    • The Glyph and the Gramophone
    • The Prodigal
    • Beyond the Pulpit
    • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
    • Sylvia Plath's Fiction

The Evil Twins of American Television

Feminist Alter Egos Since 1960

 Kristi Rowan Humphreys, Lecturer of English

The Evil Twins of American Television examines evil-twin depictions in over fifty years of television, comparing male twins to female twins and male-writer depictions to female-writer depictions. Kristi Rowan Humphreys evaluates The Patty Duke Show, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Brady Bunch, among other television programs that use the twinning trope to explore themes of feminism and identity.

Employing traits identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique as belonging to the “evil” side of her “schizophrenic split” theory, Humphreys analyzes the ways in which these alter ego characters embody the desire for a separate self and independence through loose inhibitions, career interests, political interests, intellectual prowess, and assertiveness.

This book then compares female-written twin episodes to male-written twin episodes, finding that when “evil twin” episodes are written by women writers, the twins are presented less as oppositional binaries and more as compatible, often symbiotic binaries. Thus, the women writers of these shows offer a compelling response to Friedan’s text, one that acknowledges and underscores the many complexities of women—the image of which cannot in reality be so easily split into two oppositional binaries. Humphreys then connects 1960s depictions to more current evil-twin examples, including those in Friends, Knight Rider, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Lexington Books, 2019

ISBN 9781498583296

English

College of Arts & Sciences

Carroll Science 106

Department of English
One Bear Place, #97404
Waco, TX 76798-7404

(254) 710-1768
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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications The Evil Twins of American Television
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      • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
      • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
      • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
      • Hollow Palaces
      • Haunted Property
      • American Literary Cultures
      • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
      • Modernism in the Green
      • A Long, Long Way
      • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
      • The Courage to See
      • The Evil Twins of American Television
      • Harvest Bells
      • Letters of a Long Name
      • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
      • Reforming Women
      • Thomas Hoccleve
      • Mark Twain Under Fire
      • Building Natures
      • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
      • Living with the Living Dead
      • The Life Group
      • Then Winter
      • Building Jerusalem
      • The Divine Face in Four Writers
      • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
      • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
      • Housework and Gender in American Television
      • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
      • Entertaining Judgment
      • Seamus Heaney's Regions
      • Elegy on Kinderklavier
      • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
      • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
      • The Tulip-Flame
      • The Glyph and the Gramophone
      • The Prodigal
      • Beyond the Pulpit
      • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
      • Sylvia Plath's Fiction
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