Hello and Meme!
Hi! I've been lurking on LJ- but not posting so much. I don't know if this is particularly a *return* with a more demanding Personal Life and the "It's like a car wreck!" hell-suck aspect of the American news cycle. However, I'm in for tonight and looking to LJ and I came across a great meme! So pick, an episode, any episode. Taken from frelling_tralk and kikimayName
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A scene/idea from it that's particularly interesting to me: I wrote about A Little Princess's role in Angel in BuffyForums. I'll copy over what I wrote again:
Moving onto another theme, A Little Princess is one of my favorite books. Like before fourth grade when I started reading more adult books, Sara Crewe, Jo March, Anne Shirley, Jane Eyre and Danny Saunders were my literary heroes. I’m torn between two interpretations- the surfacey interpretation Fred is Sara Crewe or the twisted interpretation that Wesley is Sarah Crewe and Fred is his Last Doll.
The passage that Wesley reads about how Sara’s whole personality was etched on her face is very much about Fred. At the end of Shells, Wesley will agree to be Illyria’s guide because Illyria looks like Fred. The personalities written on faces matter a great deal. Moreover, Fred also had Sara’s ageless quality. Sara is a little girl but one look at her serious and observant eyes and you get the feeling that Sara lived a long time. Fred comes off as little girlish but if you look seriously at her history and into her soul and you get the impression that Fred has lived longer than she acts.
One of my favorite elements of A Little Princess was Sara doing her best to maintain her education and sense of self and even more, her sense of specialness from her father that she’s his princess even when she was basically enslaved as an orphan scullery maid cut off from love or ease of life or anything other than mechanistically serving others. It very much feels like a precursor to how Fred functioned in Pylea. Sara making regular nightly trips down from her attic in the middle of the night to study in the boarding school's classrooms so she doesn’t start thinking like a scullery maid and dropping her h’s and forgetting that Henry the VIII had eight wives resonates with Fred babbling to herself about earthly things and writing physics equations on the walls of her cave.
The flashback of Fred’s final day in Texas reverberates that Fred did her best to hold onto her past life much like A Little Princess’s flashbacks and references to Sara's life in India through her make-believe stories shows the past life that Sara was fighting to keep with her. Moreover, despite the re-write of the (legitimately good) 1990s film, Sara’s father really died. Sara did her best to hold onto her past life with her father, was enslaved by Miss Minchin and forced to be a scullery maid but then Sara got to forge a much better but still ultimately difficult life as Mr. Carrisford’s adopted daughter with her father’s fortune restored to her from his will; Sara took an opportunity to be a heroine by making the nearby bakery into a sanctuary for hungry, homeless orphans.
Meanwhile, Fred’s parents were still alive and Fred got to completely choose between family and friends unlike Sara. Still, Fred also went from a perfectly happy and peaceful homelife to being a slave in Pylea to then, forging a better than Pylea but still emotionally difficult life at Angel Investigations with friends.
However, Wesley also has elements of Sara Crewe. Sara made her Last Doll that she ever got from her father representative of everything beautiful and homey in the world so that Sara could hold on and fight to keep her sense of self and stay alive despite her abysmal living conditions. Wesley has that dynamic with Fred where Wesley makes Fred the representative of everything beautiful and valuable in the world so Wesley can cope with his struggles. Of course, it’s completely blameless when it’s a nine year old doing that to their doll; it’s messed up (although still sympathetic) when it’s a grown man doing that to a romantic partner.
One of the most powerful moments in the book was when Sara *rages* at her Last Doll because it just sits there being an inanimate object instead of helping her or offering advice. When Sara rages at her doll for not being a person, it’s a signal that Sara’s hit rock bottom emotionally. In Shells, Wesley will admit that he hates Fred a little bit for being so curious that she opened Illyria’s sarcophagus. That’s a signal that Wesley hit rock bottom for a more insidious twist- hating his “doll” for acting like a person.
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Moreover, Wesley has a Sara Crewesque element that Wesley and Sarah were very much weakened and emotionally forced into a Last Doll mentality because they don’t know important truths and the people who they counted on to be friends or allies pointedly aren’t. Sara doesn't know that she wasn't left penniless and she's being gaslighted to believe that she doesn't have rights to live comfortably as a child by Miss Minchen. Wesley has been mind wiped of formative history by Angel- and it's part of why Wesley is working *for* Angel at Evil Inc. instead of being his own boss. Actually, just a pure mind-wipe that solely removed Connor from everyone's memory would restore Wesley as nominal Boss of AI as he was pre-Forgiving. We never learn how the Connor-mindwipe rewrote history so Angel ended up as CEO of AI but it further dirties Angel's big lie/mindwipe as self-serving.
Sara and Wesley both have that sense of rootlessness since they’re far away from their childhood homes. Sara’s wonderful father and Wesley’s dreadful father still instilled them with a label of destiny- Sara is a princess and Wesley is a Watcher. Sara and Wesley spend their whole story where they’re far from home trying to keep that image of themselves because it sustains them to be good. Even when Sara feels like being rude or idiotic or keeping much luxuries for herself, she stops herself because she *should* be acting like the ideal of a princess. Even when Wesley feels like quitting or doing the cowardly thing, he stops because he should be a Watcher. Moreover, a scullery maid who tries to be a princess of the rats in the garret and other scullery maid next door and a rootles fired guy who tries to be a Watcher to the most evil vampire on record has the same sense with it seems ridiculous on its surface but like such a worthy coping mechanism when viewed sympathetically.
There’s some dynamic that Fred was always keeping the reality of who she is alive (although it’s somewhat undermined by her erasing her unimpeachable heroism) throughout her life and especially when she was in exile while the Pyleans were tearing her identity apart. However, Wesley and Sara were keeping a fantasy of themselves alive through their exile- but the fantasy was so inextricably intertwined with the reality of their lives that it’s hard to tell the line. Is Wesley a Watcher? He’s not employed by the Watchers’ Council and his function falls far afield of the Council but he sure acts like a Watcher. Is Sara a princess? No, Sara has no kingdom. However, there really is something to Sara’s belief that all girls should feel like princesses- especially when it comes from a nine year old.
Moreover, Sara felt like she was a penniless orphan who was financially abandoned by her father who she deeply loved and trusted for much of the novel even though that’s not true. Her father was a canny businessman who provided for Sara financially right through his dying days and Sara had a good friend of her father’s in London who would have loved to take custody of her and raise her right. In an opposite dynamic, Wesley has false memories in his head of how he related to Angel, Fred, Gunn et al and what his own track record is in terms of mistake work to twist his personality. Sara was inhibited from objecting to her treatment and how things went down because she falsely believed that she was rejected by everyone and had no place or allies in the world. Wesley was inhibited to rejecting to how AI does business and Gunn’s brain upgrades and Angel joining W&H because Wesley believed that his role was JUST to be ally of those two.
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