Buffyversemeta entry
This is what I wrote for the buffyversemeta metathon
Title: Reader, I destroyed him.
Summary: The special treatment of girl’s stories in BtVS
Source texts: All of BtVS including the S8 comic issues 1-4. AtS S1 The Prodigal, S3 Lullaby, S4 Inside Out and S5 Damage
Word count: 2642
Notes: The original prompt was azdak’s "People are gonna die. Girls are gonna die." (Buffy, S7). Examine the special status of "girls" in the Buffyverse. The quote made me think of how the vulnerability of the potentials seems to contradict the series’ original mission statement about subverting passive female stereotypes. I went from there to thinking about the many ways in which the series did do that (the subversion thing) and how in that sense girl’s stories really do have a special status in the ‘verse. So it’s not entirely unrelated to the original topic even though if I were marking me, I think I’d fail.
Reader, I destroyed him.
It was pretty much the blonde girl in the alley in the horror movie who keeps getting killed. . . . I felt bad for her, but she was always more interesting to me than the other women. She was fun, she had sex, she was vivacious. But then she would get punished for it. Literally, I just had that image, that scene, in my mind, like the trailer for a movie-what if the girl goes into the dark alley. And the monster follows her. And she destroys him.
Joss Whedon
Various versions of the series origin myth Joss outlines above have been given in interviews and dvd commentaries, indeed two scenes initially almost identical to its imaginary trailer take place in the very first episode of the show. In the teaser a nervous blonde is lured into darkened school corridors but just as anyone who’d ever watched a horror movie would expect things to turn nasty *she* turns instead. Later Buffy herself enters the alley sensing that she’s not alone. The monster follows her but she’s waiting for him, swings down and knocks him flying. Interestingly neither of these encounters quite follows the original script. In the first the girl (Darla) is the monster, in the second the monster turns out to be a friend (or so he claims).
It’s possible, even easy, to read BtVS in terms of a Campbellian hero’s journey. It certainly plucks the cheerleader from the slasher movie's screaming chorus line and makes her the star but I like to think there’s a little more to it than Luke Skywalker with pom poms. Joss has recently admitted to a long-standing obsession with the roles women play and how they are presented in mythic narrative.[1] For this essay I want to look at how BtVS, rather than giving honourary man status to one girl’s story, rewrites multiple stories, lots of girls, lots of times and lots of different ways. Some, like the WttH teaser, are short vignettes others are novels that stretch across seasons but all attempt to subvert the far too common genre standbys of screaming, redeeming and dying.
Once Upon a Time…
In the first ever slasher film the blonde went into the shower but Whedon’s alley feels more appropriate somehow. That sense of deja vu probably reflects the genre’s connections with older folk literature and mythologies. When the blonde wore a red cape and flirted with the wolf her alley was a path through the dark, dark woods to grandma’s house. Little Red Riding Hood in the Perrault version of the fairy tale is every inch the NC-17 victim, gorily punished for straying from the paths of wisdom and virtue - the handsome man coming to save her is a later PG addition.[2]
The BtVS S3 episode Helpless rejects both PG and NC-17 adaptations cleaving closer to earlier folk tales, in which the girl herself defeats the wolf and through cunning rather than force. Buffy’s handsome (if older) man arrives too late. A second overtly Red Riding Hood referencing episode Fear Itself is more post modern in approach. The red cape is a costume and the wolf eventually exposed as a wee little puppet demon to be stamped on and ridiculed. Ridicule, let it never be forgotten, is a potent weapon in the hands of a Slayer. Where Perrault’s story and its horror movie descendants conspire to flatter the masculine, BtVS invariably deflates the more tumescent attributes of its Big Bads. Buffy mocks the Master’s scrotum-like wrinklies (Prophecy Girl), blows “Dick” to mayor smithereens (Graduation Day Part II) and ends by dispatching Caleb through possibly the most botched vasectomy in the history of surgery (Chosen).
Into the labyrinth
An alley is a passageway, archetypally an entrance to dark places. When young men enter it’s usually in pursuit of a quest - Orpheus desperately seeking Eurydice or Theseus setting out to kill the Minotaur. Mythical girls, on the other hand, go into the labyrinth either out of curiosity (Bluebeard’s wife breaking her husband’s inner sanctum, Alice following the rabbit, Lucy Pensevie pushing through coats to the back of the wardrobe), to escape some terror (Snow White or Donkeyskin) or are taken there by force (Persephone). For girls the risks of entering are also more severe, boys may fail in their quests but Bluebeard’s wives face death and Persephone exactly the kind of underworld child-bride deal that never ends well.
Labyrinths are often associated with coming of age rituals. It’s possible that these stories have sociobiological underpinnings,[3] that they reflect the statisitical relationship sex has with death for female mammals. Evolutionarily accurate or otherwise, the idea that sex can be risky for women is not one BtVS does much to subvert. Compare the fallout of Buffy and Xander’s first times (although Willow doesn’t do so badly). Unlike her mythical predecessors, however, with sex as with death Buffy *chooses* to go in. She tells Angel to kiss her in Surprise/Innocence and enters the Master’s lair in full awareness of what’s to come in Prophecy Girl. Her first time kills her whether metaphorically or literally but she gets over it and ends both episodes walking away, heart bruised but head held high.[4]
If a primary motive for entering the labyrinth is female curiosity it’s appropriate that as well as being allowed to leave the dark place our Slayer so often finds the answers to her questions there. Most frequently in dreams, which typically begin with the image of her walking through passageways but also in real time as in the S7 episode Get it Done. The Shadowmen, proto-Watchers, knock her out and (presumably) drag her unconscious to a spiral-floored cavern but after she breaks free of her chains the last man gives her the information she asks for in lieu of the power she didn’t want.
Another variation on the theme of knowledge occurs in the S4 episode Restless. Each of the core characters dreams of getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors between sets but there’s a gender-based difference in what they find at the end of their wanderings. While both Giles and Xander confront a monstrous other, Willow and Buffy meet versions of themselves. Mousy loser Willow or the first original Slayer, self-encountering is an unsettling if not downright violent experience for most of the series. It reaches a nadir in the S6 episode Dead Things when Buffy is pulled into an alley by Spike and the ensuing fight ends with her beating him to a bloody pulp in a frenzy of self-loathing. By Chosen, however, she does seem on much better terms with her shadow, the snappy comebacks are now purely verbal.
Damsels, damsels, damsels
Sometimes the story isn’t even about the girl going into the dark, sometimes she’s merely the prize to be rescued from it. Aurora dreams the forest of thorns around her castle but the fairy tale’s focus is 100 years later on the prince who fights his way though to wake her with true love’s kiss. The story is very overtly referenced in the S8 comic The Long way Home, even spinning gets full product placement with dreamXander’s complaints about McLint. This Sleeping Beauty, however, spends more time researching her enemy’s weak points than dreaming of when her prince will come (although both of them seem well on the way) and the kisser’s identity turns out to be totally irrelevant to the plot.
The damsel is something like the virgin cousin of our original blonde girl. Desirable yet innocent, her function is not to be punished but to be saved. BtVS has its fair share of damsels, even those, like Buffy, who are quickly revealed to be more than they seem often revert to a damsel-like state for emotional or plot reasons. Stories about girls transcending clichéd victimhood and learning to save themselves play out repeatedly through the series, sometimes taking a single episode to complete in other cases whole seasons.
Although traditionally female, the very first damsel on BtVS is Darla’s victim and damselling remains an equal opportunity profession throughout S1. Willow does the lion’s share but Xander gets to be abducted in Teacher’s Pet while Giles is the one who needs rescuing in Never Kill a Boy on your First Date and The Puppet Show. The darker tone of S2 lends a more disturbing sexual edge to its images of girls under attack from predatory males. Men continue to need saving but have generally either brought the evil on themselves (Giles in The Dark Age and Xander in Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered) or need to be physically tortured in order to garner the same level of audience sympathy (Angel in What’s my Line and Giles in Becoming). Buffy, with a little help from her friends, almost always manages to save herself when she’s the victim but the other regulars are very dependent on her heroism. Cordelia, for example, needs to be rescued when selected for dismemberment in Some Assembly Required or as snake bait in Reptile Boy and spends most of School Hard cowering in a closet with Willow. Speaking of Willow, however, it’s far from all cower all the time. The UrDamsel becomes ever more confident in the research and magicks department as S2 progresses and in S3 finally gets to slay her own vampires (Choices).
In the college years Willow truly comes into her own, a victim only of that lingering fear of who she used to be revealed in Restless. It’s this insecurity which fuels her S6 dependence on magic (Wrecked), her inability to picture herself in the big gun role (The Gift) drives her to resurrect Buffy (Bargaining) and Tara pays the price (Seeing Red).[5] Opinions vary on the quality of Willow’s arc in the later seasons but the story does at least go beyond a simple subversion of damselhood to attempt an in-depth critique of its long-term effects.
Dead mothers and sacrificial heroines
Although damsels lack agency at least their death is regarded as something to be avoided. In many stories, however, the death of a female character is an essential plot point. From Cinderella to The Children of Lir fairy tales driven by the actions of an evil step-mother require that the birth mother die off-screen before the story proper even begins. Alternatively the death of a woman is required at the end of the story to save the world or the hero or both. The sacrificial woman is a staple of ancient Greek drama from Alcestis to Iphigenia. More recent examples include the classic silent movie Nosferatu, in which the vampyre is defeated by Nina volunteering to lie with him until dawn, sacrificing her own life in the process.
Dead mothers outnumber fathers in Jossverse shows by a wide margin. In general male parents are absent rather than dead, the two notable exceptions are Angel’s father and Kate’s dad, both on AtS. Dead mothers, by contrast, are significant characters on both shows, Joyce, Nikki Wood, Anne, and (effectively) Catherine Maddison on BtVS, Darla on AtS. Unlike the nameless birth mothers of fairy tale and legend all of them die on screen, and whether in flashback or real time their deaths are significant events. This is also true of the two fathers’ deaths but unlike the women, fathers are not granted the power to continue to advise (or torment) their offspring from beyond the grave. Joss may like to kill mothers but he tries to make up for it afterwards. Joyce has if anything more power dead than alive, a hallucination of her drives Buffy back from the asylum in Normal Again, her appearances in S7 as the First are among its most affecting manifestations and Buffy still misses her more that anything in the first S8 comic. Nikki Wood reappears as the First in BtVS and speaking through Dana’s deranged Slayer memories on AtS. Spike’s mother returns as a “creature of the darkness” he made himself, Catherine’s image is sufficient to stop Amy in her tracks in The Long Way Home and a shade with Darla’s memories attempts to persuade Connor not to do the wrong thing in Inside Out.
Darla’s mode of death, staking herself to allow Connor to be born, also places her firmly in the sacrificial heroine category. There are slightly disturbing parallels to be drawn between her self-abnegation and Buffy’s in The Gift particularly if the latter is viewed as a sacrifice made on Dawn’s behalf. That aside Buffy’s giving herself to save the world follows her tragic predecessors’ examples to the letter except in one very significant respect. She comes back. She comes back not as a grateful ghost or a Christ-like vision but as a troublesome flesh and blood girl with issues to spare, alive but mad as hell about it and that’s something that wasn’t in the original script.
They chained her to the earth
To be consistent a series built on subversion is bound to turn its attention to its own myths eventually. BtVS is built on two that are, at the very least, questionable from a feminist perspective. The more obvious one is the patriarchal nature of the Watcher, the implication that a female superhero requires a male guide. In-series critique of the system begins with the revelation that the Watchers are governed by a shadowy organization with a far from benevolent attitude to individual Slayers (Helpless). At the end of the third season Buffy declares herself independent of the Council, in the S5 episode Checkpoint she realises that the co-dependency of the Watcher/Slayer relationship can be played to her own advantage and in S7 tells even Giles that she no longer needs a teacher (Lies My Parents Told Me).
The second myth, the one girl in all the world one, is more insidious. Female icons are all very well but when the metaphysical set up insists there can only be one she’s more like the exception that proves the rule. Season 7 addresses the issue quite literally by contrasting Buffy (now Watcherless and the ultimate authority on all things demon) with the utter powerlessness of the potentials. The repeated images of girls being chased into alleys by bogeymen with knives are disturbing and intentionally so. All the same it’s not a complete reversion to slasher movie norms, there’s a reason these harbingers have no eyes (the male gaze is literally disabled) and the girls are not being punished but persecuted.
Coincident with the potentials storyline Buffy’s problems with her calling change to focus on her singular status. In the early seasons her unheroic reluctance was cast, however sympathetically, as being rooted in the desire to revert to a ‘normal’ life. In seasons 5 and 6 her reservations related to the Nietzschean fear that she was turning into the very thing she fought - a stone cold killer. Her encounter with the Shadowmen in Get it Done re-enacts both these concerns. In Welcome to the Hellmouth she was outraged that “you people” couldn’t leave her alone, here that the Shadowmen violated “that girl.” In seasons 5 and 6 she’s concerned where her power comes from, that being the Slayer makes her hard or that she’s come back wrong, in Get it Done that more demonic power will make her less human. However, the episode ends with her accepting that the Shadowmen may have been right leaving the major cause for concern not that she’s being imposed on or part demon but that she’s alone. This fear is re-iterated throughout S7, she tells Xander that she and only she is ‘the Law’ (Selfless) confides to Holden that the others can’t understand her because they’re not the Slayer (Conversations with Dead People) and agrees with Faith that being the Slayer/leader is a burden no-one else can feel (End of Days).
That theme of existential isolation broadens the scope of the season from feminist to human concerns. The finale’s solution of activating the potentials not only empowers the show’s remaining damsels and overturns the One Girlism of the original premise it also addresses that one girl’s isolationist Slayer crap. It’s important that those freed to realize their potential are girls not only because it makes a specifically feminist statement but because Buffy is a girl and the point is not so much that other people can help her but that other people can be her, can stand in her shoes. She is no longer unique or alone.
Notes
[1] “Everybody's lecture was always about what they were obsessed with and that was mine, how women were presented, what roles they have and how they function in mythic narrative and stuff like that.”
Whedon in a recent interview given as part of a fund raising effort for Equality Now:
http://comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=10985
[2] “In the 19th century Red Riding Hood grew more discreet, and also acquired a man to safeguard her. A fatherly woodsman rescues Red from the beast’s belly and gives her a second chance to walk the straight path through life in “Little Red Cap,” published in 1812 by the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This is the version of the tale that most people know today.”
In Dances with Wolves by Catherine Orenstein in Ms magazine:
http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2004/danceswithwolves.asp
[3] “One of the principal causes of death before the 19th century was childbirth and both child and female mortality was high. In the forbidden chamber, Bluebeard’s wife had perhaps found herself face to face with the circumstances of her own future death.”
In From the Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner Chatto and Windus (London) 1994
[4] “Season Two's arc is the slasher plot stretched out over half a season, with some crucial differences. The killer (Angelus) is unleashed by desire--but it's not the sexually active who die here. There's been a lot of criticism of how Buffy is "punished" for sexuality, but I tend to think Season Two's greatest legacy may be the way it represents sexual disaster as survivable. This is not a particularly common message for girls.”
In The Final Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer by coffeeandink:
http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/565862.html
[5] “In the early episodes of season 6, the idea of becoming the next Anakin Skywalker seems to exert the same pull on Willow as Supervillany does on the three nerds. She gains the power to remake the world to her own liking, but is that really what she wants? This is the girl who balked at even being called the Big Gun following her first experience of real power in the final episodes of Season 5. Raising Buffy from the dead feels amazing but also absolves Willow of having to stay “boss of us” and that may be the point. Like most of us, I suspect, Willow wants to feel like Super!Willow without the attendant responsibility of being her.”
Egregious self-pimping:
http://aycheb.livejournal.com/867.html
Also Willow killed Tara! In pictures! To music!
http://aycheb.imeem.com/video/zAp8CXaF/btvs_perfectday/
Title: Reader, I destroyed him.
Summary: The special treatment of girl’s stories in BtVS
Source texts: All of BtVS including the S8 comic issues 1-4. AtS S1 The Prodigal, S3 Lullaby, S4 Inside Out and S5 Damage
Word count: 2642
Notes: The original prompt was azdak’s "People are gonna die. Girls are gonna die." (Buffy, S7). Examine the special status of "girls" in the Buffyverse. The quote made me think of how the vulnerability of the potentials seems to contradict the series’ original mission statement about subverting passive female stereotypes. I went from there to thinking about the many ways in which the series did do that (the subversion thing) and how in that sense girl’s stories really do have a special status in the ‘verse. So it’s not entirely unrelated to the original topic even though if I were marking me, I think I’d fail.
Reader, I destroyed him.
It was pretty much the blonde girl in the alley in the horror movie who keeps getting killed. . . . I felt bad for her, but she was always more interesting to me than the other women. She was fun, she had sex, she was vivacious. But then she would get punished for it. Literally, I just had that image, that scene, in my mind, like the trailer for a movie-what if the girl goes into the dark alley. And the monster follows her. And she destroys him.
Joss Whedon
Various versions of the series origin myth Joss outlines above have been given in interviews and dvd commentaries, indeed two scenes initially almost identical to its imaginary trailer take place in the very first episode of the show. In the teaser a nervous blonde is lured into darkened school corridors but just as anyone who’d ever watched a horror movie would expect things to turn nasty *she* turns instead. Later Buffy herself enters the alley sensing that she’s not alone. The monster follows her but she’s waiting for him, swings down and knocks him flying. Interestingly neither of these encounters quite follows the original script. In the first the girl (Darla) is the monster, in the second the monster turns out to be a friend (or so he claims).
It’s possible, even easy, to read BtVS in terms of a Campbellian hero’s journey. It certainly plucks the cheerleader from the slasher movie's screaming chorus line and makes her the star but I like to think there’s a little more to it than Luke Skywalker with pom poms. Joss has recently admitted to a long-standing obsession with the roles women play and how they are presented in mythic narrative.[1] For this essay I want to look at how BtVS, rather than giving honourary man status to one girl’s story, rewrites multiple stories, lots of girls, lots of times and lots of different ways. Some, like the WttH teaser, are short vignettes others are novels that stretch across seasons but all attempt to subvert the far too common genre standbys of screaming, redeeming and dying.
Once Upon a Time…
In the first ever slasher film the blonde went into the shower but Whedon’s alley feels more appropriate somehow. That sense of deja vu probably reflects the genre’s connections with older folk literature and mythologies. When the blonde wore a red cape and flirted with the wolf her alley was a path through the dark, dark woods to grandma’s house. Little Red Riding Hood in the Perrault version of the fairy tale is every inch the NC-17 victim, gorily punished for straying from the paths of wisdom and virtue - the handsome man coming to save her is a later PG addition.[2]
The BtVS S3 episode Helpless rejects both PG and NC-17 adaptations cleaving closer to earlier folk tales, in which the girl herself defeats the wolf and through cunning rather than force. Buffy’s handsome (if older) man arrives too late. A second overtly Red Riding Hood referencing episode Fear Itself is more post modern in approach. The red cape is a costume and the wolf eventually exposed as a wee little puppet demon to be stamped on and ridiculed. Ridicule, let it never be forgotten, is a potent weapon in the hands of a Slayer. Where Perrault’s story and its horror movie descendants conspire to flatter the masculine, BtVS invariably deflates the more tumescent attributes of its Big Bads. Buffy mocks the Master’s scrotum-like wrinklies (Prophecy Girl), blows “Dick” to mayor smithereens (Graduation Day Part II) and ends by dispatching Caleb through possibly the most botched vasectomy in the history of surgery (Chosen).
Into the labyrinth
An alley is a passageway, archetypally an entrance to dark places. When young men enter it’s usually in pursuit of a quest - Orpheus desperately seeking Eurydice or Theseus setting out to kill the Minotaur. Mythical girls, on the other hand, go into the labyrinth either out of curiosity (Bluebeard’s wife breaking her husband’s inner sanctum, Alice following the rabbit, Lucy Pensevie pushing through coats to the back of the wardrobe), to escape some terror (Snow White or Donkeyskin) or are taken there by force (Persephone). For girls the risks of entering are also more severe, boys may fail in their quests but Bluebeard’s wives face death and Persephone exactly the kind of underworld child-bride deal that never ends well.
Labyrinths are often associated with coming of age rituals. It’s possible that these stories have sociobiological underpinnings,[3] that they reflect the statisitical relationship sex has with death for female mammals. Evolutionarily accurate or otherwise, the idea that sex can be risky for women is not one BtVS does much to subvert. Compare the fallout of Buffy and Xander’s first times (although Willow doesn’t do so badly). Unlike her mythical predecessors, however, with sex as with death Buffy *chooses* to go in. She tells Angel to kiss her in Surprise/Innocence and enters the Master’s lair in full awareness of what’s to come in Prophecy Girl. Her first time kills her whether metaphorically or literally but she gets over it and ends both episodes walking away, heart bruised but head held high.[4]
If a primary motive for entering the labyrinth is female curiosity it’s appropriate that as well as being allowed to leave the dark place our Slayer so often finds the answers to her questions there. Most frequently in dreams, which typically begin with the image of her walking through passageways but also in real time as in the S7 episode Get it Done. The Shadowmen, proto-Watchers, knock her out and (presumably) drag her unconscious to a spiral-floored cavern but after she breaks free of her chains the last man gives her the information she asks for in lieu of the power she didn’t want.
Another variation on the theme of knowledge occurs in the S4 episode Restless. Each of the core characters dreams of getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors between sets but there’s a gender-based difference in what they find at the end of their wanderings. While both Giles and Xander confront a monstrous other, Willow and Buffy meet versions of themselves. Mousy loser Willow or the first original Slayer, self-encountering is an unsettling if not downright violent experience for most of the series. It reaches a nadir in the S6 episode Dead Things when Buffy is pulled into an alley by Spike and the ensuing fight ends with her beating him to a bloody pulp in a frenzy of self-loathing. By Chosen, however, she does seem on much better terms with her shadow, the snappy comebacks are now purely verbal.
Damsels, damsels, damsels
Sometimes the story isn’t even about the girl going into the dark, sometimes she’s merely the prize to be rescued from it. Aurora dreams the forest of thorns around her castle but the fairy tale’s focus is 100 years later on the prince who fights his way though to wake her with true love’s kiss. The story is very overtly referenced in the S8 comic The Long way Home, even spinning gets full product placement with dreamXander’s complaints about McLint. This Sleeping Beauty, however, spends more time researching her enemy’s weak points than dreaming of when her prince will come (although both of them seem well on the way) and the kisser’s identity turns out to be totally irrelevant to the plot.
The damsel is something like the virgin cousin of our original blonde girl. Desirable yet innocent, her function is not to be punished but to be saved. BtVS has its fair share of damsels, even those, like Buffy, who are quickly revealed to be more than they seem often revert to a damsel-like state for emotional or plot reasons. Stories about girls transcending clichéd victimhood and learning to save themselves play out repeatedly through the series, sometimes taking a single episode to complete in other cases whole seasons.
Although traditionally female, the very first damsel on BtVS is Darla’s victim and damselling remains an equal opportunity profession throughout S1. Willow does the lion’s share but Xander gets to be abducted in Teacher’s Pet while Giles is the one who needs rescuing in Never Kill a Boy on your First Date and The Puppet Show. The darker tone of S2 lends a more disturbing sexual edge to its images of girls under attack from predatory males. Men continue to need saving but have generally either brought the evil on themselves (Giles in The Dark Age and Xander in Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered) or need to be physically tortured in order to garner the same level of audience sympathy (Angel in What’s my Line and Giles in Becoming). Buffy, with a little help from her friends, almost always manages to save herself when she’s the victim but the other regulars are very dependent on her heroism. Cordelia, for example, needs to be rescued when selected for dismemberment in Some Assembly Required or as snake bait in Reptile Boy and spends most of School Hard cowering in a closet with Willow. Speaking of Willow, however, it’s far from all cower all the time. The UrDamsel becomes ever more confident in the research and magicks department as S2 progresses and in S3 finally gets to slay her own vampires (Choices).
In the college years Willow truly comes into her own, a victim only of that lingering fear of who she used to be revealed in Restless. It’s this insecurity which fuels her S6 dependence on magic (Wrecked), her inability to picture herself in the big gun role (The Gift) drives her to resurrect Buffy (Bargaining) and Tara pays the price (Seeing Red).[5] Opinions vary on the quality of Willow’s arc in the later seasons but the story does at least go beyond a simple subversion of damselhood to attempt an in-depth critique of its long-term effects.
Dead mothers and sacrificial heroines
Although damsels lack agency at least their death is regarded as something to be avoided. In many stories, however, the death of a female character is an essential plot point. From Cinderella to The Children of Lir fairy tales driven by the actions of an evil step-mother require that the birth mother die off-screen before the story proper even begins. Alternatively the death of a woman is required at the end of the story to save the world or the hero or both. The sacrificial woman is a staple of ancient Greek drama from Alcestis to Iphigenia. More recent examples include the classic silent movie Nosferatu, in which the vampyre is defeated by Nina volunteering to lie with him until dawn, sacrificing her own life in the process.
Dead mothers outnumber fathers in Jossverse shows by a wide margin. In general male parents are absent rather than dead, the two notable exceptions are Angel’s father and Kate’s dad, both on AtS. Dead mothers, by contrast, are significant characters on both shows, Joyce, Nikki Wood, Anne, and (effectively) Catherine Maddison on BtVS, Darla on AtS. Unlike the nameless birth mothers of fairy tale and legend all of them die on screen, and whether in flashback or real time their deaths are significant events. This is also true of the two fathers’ deaths but unlike the women, fathers are not granted the power to continue to advise (or torment) their offspring from beyond the grave. Joss may like to kill mothers but he tries to make up for it afterwards. Joyce has if anything more power dead than alive, a hallucination of her drives Buffy back from the asylum in Normal Again, her appearances in S7 as the First are among its most affecting manifestations and Buffy still misses her more that anything in the first S8 comic. Nikki Wood reappears as the First in BtVS and speaking through Dana’s deranged Slayer memories on AtS. Spike’s mother returns as a “creature of the darkness” he made himself, Catherine’s image is sufficient to stop Amy in her tracks in The Long Way Home and a shade with Darla’s memories attempts to persuade Connor not to do the wrong thing in Inside Out.
Darla’s mode of death, staking herself to allow Connor to be born, also places her firmly in the sacrificial heroine category. There are slightly disturbing parallels to be drawn between her self-abnegation and Buffy’s in The Gift particularly if the latter is viewed as a sacrifice made on Dawn’s behalf. That aside Buffy’s giving herself to save the world follows her tragic predecessors’ examples to the letter except in one very significant respect. She comes back. She comes back not as a grateful ghost or a Christ-like vision but as a troublesome flesh and blood girl with issues to spare, alive but mad as hell about it and that’s something that wasn’t in the original script.
They chained her to the earth
To be consistent a series built on subversion is bound to turn its attention to its own myths eventually. BtVS is built on two that are, at the very least, questionable from a feminist perspective. The more obvious one is the patriarchal nature of the Watcher, the implication that a female superhero requires a male guide. In-series critique of the system begins with the revelation that the Watchers are governed by a shadowy organization with a far from benevolent attitude to individual Slayers (Helpless). At the end of the third season Buffy declares herself independent of the Council, in the S5 episode Checkpoint she realises that the co-dependency of the Watcher/Slayer relationship can be played to her own advantage and in S7 tells even Giles that she no longer needs a teacher (Lies My Parents Told Me).
The second myth, the one girl in all the world one, is more insidious. Female icons are all very well but when the metaphysical set up insists there can only be one she’s more like the exception that proves the rule. Season 7 addresses the issue quite literally by contrasting Buffy (now Watcherless and the ultimate authority on all things demon) with the utter powerlessness of the potentials. The repeated images of girls being chased into alleys by bogeymen with knives are disturbing and intentionally so. All the same it’s not a complete reversion to slasher movie norms, there’s a reason these harbingers have no eyes (the male gaze is literally disabled) and the girls are not being punished but persecuted.
Coincident with the potentials storyline Buffy’s problems with her calling change to focus on her singular status. In the early seasons her unheroic reluctance was cast, however sympathetically, as being rooted in the desire to revert to a ‘normal’ life. In seasons 5 and 6 her reservations related to the Nietzschean fear that she was turning into the very thing she fought - a stone cold killer. Her encounter with the Shadowmen in Get it Done re-enacts both these concerns. In Welcome to the Hellmouth she was outraged that “you people” couldn’t leave her alone, here that the Shadowmen violated “that girl.” In seasons 5 and 6 she’s concerned where her power comes from, that being the Slayer makes her hard or that she’s come back wrong, in Get it Done that more demonic power will make her less human. However, the episode ends with her accepting that the Shadowmen may have been right leaving the major cause for concern not that she’s being imposed on or part demon but that she’s alone. This fear is re-iterated throughout S7, she tells Xander that she and only she is ‘the Law’ (Selfless) confides to Holden that the others can’t understand her because they’re not the Slayer (Conversations with Dead People) and agrees with Faith that being the Slayer/leader is a burden no-one else can feel (End of Days).
That theme of existential isolation broadens the scope of the season from feminist to human concerns. The finale’s solution of activating the potentials not only empowers the show’s remaining damsels and overturns the One Girlism of the original premise it also addresses that one girl’s isolationist Slayer crap. It’s important that those freed to realize their potential are girls not only because it makes a specifically feminist statement but because Buffy is a girl and the point is not so much that other people can help her but that other people can be her, can stand in her shoes. She is no longer unique or alone.
Notes
[1] “Everybody's lecture was always about what they were obsessed with and that was mine, how women were presented, what roles they have and how they function in mythic narrative and stuff like that.”
Whedon in a recent interview given as part of a fund raising effort for Equality Now:
http://comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=10985
[2] “In the 19th century Red Riding Hood grew more discreet, and also acquired a man to safeguard her. A fatherly woodsman rescues Red from the beast’s belly and gives her a second chance to walk the straight path through life in “Little Red Cap,” published in 1812 by the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This is the version of the tale that most people know today.”
In Dances with Wolves by Catherine Orenstein in Ms magazine:
http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2004/danceswithwolves.asp
[3] “One of the principal causes of death before the 19th century was childbirth and both child and female mortality was high. In the forbidden chamber, Bluebeard’s wife had perhaps found herself face to face with the circumstances of her own future death.”
In From the Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner Chatto and Windus (London) 1994
[4] “Season Two's arc is the slasher plot stretched out over half a season, with some crucial differences. The killer (Angelus) is unleashed by desire--but it's not the sexually active who die here. There's been a lot of criticism of how Buffy is "punished" for sexuality, but I tend to think Season Two's greatest legacy may be the way it represents sexual disaster as survivable. This is not a particularly common message for girls.”
In The Final Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer by coffeeandink:
http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/565862.html
[5] “In the early episodes of season 6, the idea of becoming the next Anakin Skywalker seems to exert the same pull on Willow as Supervillany does on the three nerds. She gains the power to remake the world to her own liking, but is that really what she wants? This is the girl who balked at even being called the Big Gun following her first experience of real power in the final episodes of Season 5. Raising Buffy from the dead feels amazing but also absolves Willow of having to stay “boss of us” and that may be the point. Like most of us, I suspect, Willow wants to feel like Super!Willow without the attendant responsibility of being her.”
Egregious self-pimping:
http://aycheb.livejournal.com/867.html
Also Willow killed Tara! In pictures! To music!
http://aycheb.imeem.com/video/zAp8CXaF/btvs_perfectday/