ABSTRACT
In 1913, the American writer Edward Salisbury Field published a short comic novel called Twin Beds. Today, it reads as a rather predictable farce, dependent on a set of all-too-familiar props: a married couple, their bedroom, an intruder, mistaken identities, a disapproving mother, hasty escapes via a fire escape and concealment in a large laundry basket. The twin beds that give the novel its title are purchased by the naïve young wife, Blanche, because the shop assistant had said ‘twin beds were stylish and everybody was using them’. The durability of a farce headlining this way of sleeping and plotted around the imaginative spaces in between the beds and their married occupants suggests that it touched a cultural nerve that remained susceptible to the stimulus of twin beds and their comic potential for many years.
