Encountering one’s double redirects aggression from the other toward the self.

Evidence

One of the most celebrated depictions of doppelgangers in Western art is a lush Pre-Raphaelite painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It depicts a couple in medieval dress in a dark forest who come across another couple who are their mirror image. It is not a happy encounter. The man who sees his double draws his sword in anger, while his female companion faints, overcome by the uncanny sight. The piece is titled How They Met Themselves. … Now, in these shadow-laden woods, I find myself confronting not her but myself, and the uncomfortable truth that I still care, far too much, about the image I am projecting into the world; that if I am serious about rejecting personal branding, I still have a good deal of work to do. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 217

Categorization

• XREF: The Rossetti painting How They Met Themselves parallels the doubles in the fictional library - Vidal’s Eighteen Seventy and White Noise’s doubled characters share this mirror-encounter motif. — connects to: Erotic combat between the sexes is really each person fighting their own repudiated self — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1978
• DEFINE: Klein establishes the doppelganger journey as one that turns outward sword-battle inward: this is the methodological hinge of the whole book.