THE REEK OF HUMAN BLOOD SMILES OUT OF ME

Starving vampire 1: Well i'd like to take that evil staff of his and shove it where the sun don't shine

The doppelgänger, that persistent haunt of Romantic fiction, is our incessant reminder of the literal doubleness, the fact that the self with whom we live in intimacy can become deformed and a stranger; and a sobering reminder as well of the mask of commonality that passes for family happiness. In Romantic fiction by women, however, including that of Jane Austen, the sense of doubleness tends to take on a narrower focus. Its pervasive philosophic awareness of the self's protentional self-betrayal becomes a more concrete, if ambiguously shifting, vision of the double face of male authority.