| Riding high on the tide of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's popularity, Sophie Levy presents an intelligent discussion of this academic pop star, and offers compelling evidence of why the show deserves increased attention. Presenting a positive image of adolescent femininity which exists outside of more cynical prescriptions of how "empowered females" ought to act and in contrast to models of bubblegum sexuality offered by idols like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, Levy argues that Buffy is able to negotiate a sense of agency even as she is situated within a contemporary high school setting and prime time television by taking control of the tools, tropes, and traditions she is given and making them her own. | |
"You still my girl?": Adolescent Femininity as Resistance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1]
Sophie Levy
BUFFY: Sure it is. 'Cause what's more real? A sick girl in an institution...
DAWN: Don't. Please. Listen to me.
BUFFY: Or some kind of super-girl chosen to fight demons and save the world? That's ridiculous."Normal Again" VI:18
"Welcome to the Hellmouth": Opening (up) the Debate
BUFFY: (to vampire) I'm Buffy. And you're -- history. (Stakes him)
"Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" I:5
<1> History is where
the dead things are. Buffy, as her Watcher Rupert Giles tells her mother Joyce,
resists the historical. "She lives very much in the now, and history of
course, is very much about the then" he stammers, aware perhaps of the
history echoing in his British accent ("Angel" I:7). The show's appeal,
however, resides in its battle with history, not its denial. History is the
repressed but resurrected, whether personal -- Giles' "dark age" of
demon-worship comes back to (almost) kill him ("The Dark Age" II:8)
-- or cultural, such as the Master's bad Old World "family" of vampires.
The force that stands between the resurgence of the occulted past and the world's
continuation is the myth of an adolescent girl, presently incarnated in Buffy
Summers. The Slayer presents an alternative history to vampires who inhere in
the same body throughout time but derive their power from multiplicity. The
Slayer is ever-changing, ever-singular, and forever embodied in a teenage girl.
<2> The Slayer's powers are supernatural, but in the highly individual
form of Buffy, they are also related to her being-in-the-world as a white, middle-class
teenaged American girl, able to identify vampires by their lack of fashion sense
[2]. "Slayage" is an extension of
her consumerist presentism, which is connected to the adolescent fantasy of
being the center of one's world. "Consumption-based [adolescent] selfhood
sees itself as the key figure of a T.V. program, movie or commercial,"
remarks Langman (qtd. in Frost 2001, 85). As star of her eponymous show, Buffy
epitomises this fantasy. Her performance enables her world's existence in both
senses: she justifies the "Buffyverse," and she protects it. Her best
friend Willow, who has transformed, over the course of six seasons, from a shy
A-student dressed in "the softer side of Sears" to a sexually confident,
powerful "truck-driving magic mama," contests Buffy's claim to enabling
individuality: her Slayer powers (Cordelia, "Welcome to the Hellmouth"
I:I; Andrew, "Two Down" VI:21). Buffy defends herself on the same
ground:
WILLOW: Six years as a sideman, and now I get to be the Slayer.
BUFFY: [...] Being a Slayer means something you can't conceive of.
WILLOW: Oh, Buffy. You really need to have every square inch of your ass kicked.
BUFFY: Then show me what you've got. And I'll show you what a Slayer is. ("Two Down" VI:21)
The two girls cover every square inch of the screen with ass-kicking. It is a rare moment in television: two young women fighting, not over a man, but over the fate of the world. Buffy fights as a girl: she wears high-heeled boots and fashionable clothes. Unlike Wonder Woman, Buffy's power does not inhere in a stylized costume; it is linked to the normative world of adolescent femininity, where clothes define identity. "All dressed up in big sister's clothes," challenges the rogue Slayer Faith when Buffy arrives to fight her, wearing red leather pants that code as similar to Faith's wardrobe ("Graduation Day I" III:21). Season Three played repeatedly with Buffy and Faith as doubles, and with Buffy's dangerous attraction to Faith's Slayer power-derived amorality. Buffy rejects Faith's blasé apothegm of "Want. Take. Have," but the two Slayers are locked into a violent embrace ("Bad Girls" III:14). When they fight, they are as evenly-matched as their outfits.
<3> Faith and Willow illustrate my central thesis: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" ("BtVS") draws its power from adolescent femininity. Moreover, it focuses on adolescent femininity as a source of alternative, insurgent and counter-discursive powers. When Buffy and Willow fight, their powers derive not from their sexuality, but from their emotional sense of self, a definition of femininity which, in aligning emotions with physical prowess and tactical skills, is in itself counter-discursive. The Slayer's gendered sense of self is not predicated on her sexual being. When Slayage and sexuality become imbricated, as when Buffy has sex with the ensouled vampire Angel and "turns" him back to his demon self Angelus by erasing the curse that ensouled him, sexual desire (ability) is shown to threaten the integrity of Buffy's Slayer/self-identity. "BtVS" does not deny teen sexuality, or the counter-discursive potential of sexual desires; it indicates that confident sexuality is a manifestation of self-esteem. As Willow's Wicca powers develop in Season Four, she also becomes open about her lesbian sexuality. Sexual desire is a symbol of insurgency, not its source. This reverses the claim of "girl power" that flagrant female sexuality reclaims a power source exploited by the patriarchy to empower women themselves. Buffy does not inhabit the masochistic self-presentation that Britney Spears hymns in "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)": after Angel has "turned" and attacks her, Buffy meets him blow for blow. Although she cannot kill him, a swift knee floors him, his masculinity made vulnerable by a power that transcends her sexuality ("Innocence" II:14).
<4> Angelus initially attacks her not with swordplay, but wordplay. His parting shot "the morning after," a deadpan "I'll call you," leaves Buffy stunned ("Innocence" II:14). This silence is unusual, for Buffy is a woman of wit as well as action. Willow pays homage to this skill: "The Slayer always says a pun or a witty play on words, and I think it throws off the vampires" ("Anne" III:1). As Rhonda Wilcox notes, all "BtVS"'s teen characters both use language to slay, and slay language, deconstructing it syntactically and semantically (Wilcox 1999, 22). Ironic, reflexive and intertextual, this deconstruction reflects the show's resistance. Even in a prom dress, Buffy slays the Master, an ancient vampire who had left her for dead in his lair, with her pretty wit. Resuscitated by her friend Xander's unlikely act of heroism, Buffy pursues the Master to the roof of the school library, where she challenges him:
BUFFY: I may be dead, but I'm still pretty. Which is more than I can say for you.
MASTER: You were destined to die! It was written!
BUFFY: What can I say? I flunked the written. ("Prophecy Girl" I:1)
"[F]lunk[ing] the written," Buffy passes the oral, underwriting an insurgent combination of physical confidence and linguistic dexterity. As Willow asks her friend, connecting femininity and semantic play, "Did we not put the 'grrrr' in 'girl'?" ("Living Conditions" IV:2). This is the power of female adolescence: to answer back to adulthood, "I'm Buffy, and you're -- history."
"School Hard": The Academy as Buffy-Watchers
WILLOW: "Images of Pop Culture." This is good. They watch movies, shows, even commercials.
BUFFY: For credit?
WILLOW: Isn't college cool?"The Freshman" IV:1
<5> "BtVS" reflexively recognises and resists the academy's critical attention. In "Checkpoint" (V:12), a female Watcher shyly tells a sneering but flattered Spike "I, uh, wrote my thesis on you." Lavery and Wilcox complete the reflexive circle, quoting this exchange as epigraph to their collection of "BtVS" essays, Fighting the Forces (Wilcox and Lavery 2002). Like the Watcher in Spike's presence, the essays circle with wary fascination around the show, praising and challenging it by implicitly eliding two ideas: the fine line between discourse and counter-discourse in any pop culture product, and performances of adolescent femininity as the embodiment of this blur/boundary. Thus, "BtVS" enters the academy as exemplum of both conformity and resistance, offsetting its normative heroine with powerful allegories of anti-institutional counter-discourse, particularly through its high-school years, which culminate with Buffy and Giles blowing up the school library ("Graduation Day II" III:22).
<6> In its insistence on the world's continuation, however, the show also constantly interrogates the role of the larger institution, of which school is merely a representation that symbolically pervades the nightmares of the characters ("Nightmares"; "Restless" I:10; IV:22). This culminates in "Normal Again," (VI:18) which posits an alternative universe dubbed "The Asylum," to which Buffy is despatched by demon poison. In this alternate "normal" world, Buffy is a patient in a mental hospital, "a sick girl in an institution." The oscillation between the Buffyverse and The Asylum permits a ventriloquism of Buffy's self-criticism through the Asylum doctor. He challenges her, "all of those people you created in Sunnydale, they aren't as comforting as they once were. Are they? They're coming apart." This allegory of Buffy's inner turmoil operates as both textual criticism -- season six has been somewhat frayed at the seams -- and as psychological drama. Buffy is tempted by the world of The Asylum, in which her parents are alive and married. Her mother (who had died in Season Five in the Buffyverse) encourages her to remain in The Asylum, by offering her a sentiment that sends her back to Sunnydale to rescue her friends, "Believe in yourself." Buffy does believe in herself, and in the world she has called into being, drawing us as viewers to believe.
<7> Yet the episode gives us both worlds -- the world of vampires and Slayage, and the world of "sick girl[s] in an institution" -- as reflections of our own, a double Foucauldian text at the intersection of heterotopia and panopticon, of surveillance and will to knowledge. After Buffy drinks the antidote, The Asylum remains, and so does its Buffy, at least in physical form: examining her blank eyes, the doctor concludes, "there's no reaction at all." Portraying both worlds with equal validity, the episode does not foreclose on which more closely reflects our reality -- a critical agency which Buffy embodies, and which this essay attempts to explore.
"Bad Girls": Buffy and/as Feminist Counter-Discourse
RILEY: Anybody ever tell Team You the quarterback throws like a girl? (Throws the ball.)
BUFFY: (catches it, frowning) I do?
(Buffy throws the ball. It drills Riley smack in the head and he goes down hard.)"Buffy vs. Dracula" V:1
<8> The Slayer may "throw like a girl," but she refuses coaching from her older and more powerful sexual partners -- the ensouled vampire Angel, her college T.A. Riley, and the vampire Spike. Instead, she develops through her affinities with the show's other female characters. The centrality of the Buffy/Willow/Faith triangulation, and of Buffy's matriarchal family (Buffy, her mother Joyce, and her sister Dawn) to the show's development is reflected in the show's attraction for feminist critics. While there are as many feminist positions on the show as there are female subject-positions within it, as an empowered girl, Buffy -- however white and middle-class, however fetishised and hetero-normative -- has prompted critics "to boldly go" into pop culture realms even as they describe their own resistance. Perhaps like The X-Files' Agent Scully, they are drawn into an unwilling fascination with a text whose counter-discursive potential resides in its contradictoriness.
<9> If "BtVS" does not share Agent Scully's double scepticism about the paranormal and patriarchal conspiracies of power, it does share her insistence on knowledge -- and on relational knowledge in particular. As developed by Donna Haraway, in relational praxis the scientist's authority and responsibility derive from her subjective position within her research or discourse. The object of study -- here, the Slayer as imbricated in the forces which she battles -- is "an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally...a slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of 'objective' knowledge" (Haraway, qtd. in Parks, 121-2). Whereas Scully's scepticism continually resists her incorporation into the alien bodies that she studies, Buffy's physical fate is entwined with the un-bodies she has to (re)search and destroy. This is particularly poignant when the body is Angel's, (re)turned to his demon form Angelus through sexual pleasure. Buffy's sexual body and her Slayer body are imbricated in the apocalypse this change predicates, and in its prevention.
<10> Before the battle, however, come the books. Like other horror texts, "BtVS" is littered with Latin incantations, but is probably the only one to link these epistemologically to the equally impenetrable, arcane and necessary world of high school education. "By reconciling knowing and being, Buffy falls outside the mainstream of superheroes," and, one could argue, the mainstream of teenage girls, for whom knowledge and physical/social being are separated (Playden 127). Resistant to academic study, Buffy puts in book-time when the situation concerns her:
[Library, early morning. Enter GILES. BUFFY asleep surrounded by books, with a drawer from the card catalogue on her lap.]
[...]
BUFFY: What if I told you that I had a dream about Angel and, it brought up some questions?
GILES: [...] Must have been some dream. I didn't think you knew what a card index was for.
BUFFY: I dreamt that he came back. ("Beauty and the Beasts" III:4)
The episode's title alludes to the fairy tale in which a beautiful girl "tames" a beast. Here, however, Angel comes back as a beast who cannot be tamed or understood by Buffy's academic research. The episode concludes with her reading from Jack London's Call of the Wild to a chained-up Angel. "BtVS"' literary affinities appropriate patriarchal texts from the Malleus Maleficarum, used to torture a fair number of women, to "Beauty and the Beast" and Call of the Wild. London's myth of the male originary natural world is resisted and incorporated into the Buffyverse, where the men remain wild, but are chained and caged. The "grrrr" is put into "girl."
<11> This rewriting of intertexts reaches its pinnacle in "Buffy vs. Dracula," where Buffy takes on the nineteenth-century revenant whose persistence is described by Nina Auerbach: "there are no vampires, only The Vampire. He is always male, always Dracula, and always emanating from untouchable dark places in our minds" (Auerbach 1995, 131). Buffy's experience as a Slayer, and her cultural context as an American teen, allow her to respond to Dracula's dark appearance irreverently:
BUFFY: So let me get this straight. You're (in Dracula's accent) Dracula. The guy, the count.
DRACULA: I am.
BUFFY: And you're sure this isn't just some fanboy thing? Cause I've fought more than a couple of pimply, overweight vamps that called themselves Lestat.
In a few choice words, Buffy performs Irigarayan mimicry, casting doubt on Dracula's identity by mimicking his accent; voices her relational awareness of the lineage of vampire literature with a reference to Anne Rice's Lestat; and challenges that patriarchal descent by mocking its modern-day avatars as "pimply, overweight vamps." "The Vampire" comes to Sunnydale not to convert Buffy to the dark side, but to convince her that she is already part of this lineage, speaking of her "power so near to our own." He seduces her to a deeper knowledge of Slayage through a taste of vampirism:
DRACULA: There is so much I have to teach you. Your history, your power, what your body is capable of --
BUFFY: I don't need to know.
DRACULA: You long to [...] But first, a little taste.
BUFFY: I won't let you.
DRACULA: I didn't mean for me.
The voice of Old World patriarchal hegemony offers to co-opt the Slayer's "history... power... body" into an epistemology that aligns her with the forces she fights. She "tastes," but pulls back. "You are resisting," protests Dracula, and Buffy asserts that this resistance in her "true nature."
<12> Drawing on this encounter with Dracula, and his intimations about the origin of her powers, Buffy turns to Giles in her "need to know more. About where I come from, about the other Slayers [...] I can't do it without you" ("Buffy vs. Dracula"). Giles' role in the series is often critiqued as "decidedly feminised" or asexual, assigned to a desk job as Watcher, and subsequently struggling to redefine himself after he leaves the hierarchy of the Watchers' Council (Owen 1999, 24). Giles can be read as the trans-sexual potential of postmodernism, a compiler and re-interpreter of histories. He espouses basic postmodern theory when analysing his opponent: "There's a great deal of myth about Dracula. I imagine the trick to defeating him lies in separating the fact from the fiction." As Buffy's Watcher, he filters the viewer's role in a way that situates him as critic with Buffy as text. He offers a new model for feminist intervention predicated not on gender but on affinity. Buffy's realization that she can actively seek this historicist, deconstructive critical interaction marks her maturation, a stage at which she is able to reflect on her "true nature" and its origins, recognising resistance as power.
"Helpless": Buffy, Dawn and Abjection as Narrative Agency
JONATHAN: [...] 'Cause the burden of being beautiful and athletic, that's a crippler.
BUFFY: [...] You're an idiot. My life happens to on occasion suck beyond the telling of it."Earshot" III:18
<13> Buffy's resistance to Dracula derives from frustrating experiences of powerlessness. Her unwilling seduction is echoed in Season Six by her deviant, self-hating sexual relationship with the vampire Spike, metaphorically emasculated by a military implant that disenables him from attacking humans. This season repeatedly invoked previous instances of Buffy's loss of confidence, manifested as demons or others stealing her power. In "Normal Again," the poison spike of the demon that sends Buffy to The Asylum is transmuted into the needle of the psychiatric nurse struggling to control her. This scene of powerlessness, in which Buffy is drugged and restrained, evokes an earlier poisoning. In "Helpless" (III:12), she is deprived of her powers as a test of her Slayer skills. Giles is charged by the Watchers' Council to inject her secretly with an organic compound that dulls her power. Taking place on the traditional threshold of adulthood, Buffy's eighteenth birthday, the test involved facing a vampire who in life had been a serial rapist and killer of women. He threatens the life of Buffy's mother, and thus her sense of matrilineage. This episode, and those that follow it, particularly "Doppelgängland," and "Enemies" (III:16; 17), describe a discourse of adolescent femininity confronting the source of its own powers and weaknesses. In the former, Willow's alter ego, a lesbian S/M vampire, is accidentally conjured into Sunnydale by Willow, who is beginning to experiment with her magic powers. VampWillow confuses the "Scooby gang" (Buffy et al.) by disrupting their categorisation of Willow's identity as the "good" girl, particularly as Willow "performs" VampWillow in order to save civilians whom VampWillow had imprisoned.
<14> More disturbingly, Buffy's alter ego Faith -- whose leather gear VampWillow sports allusively -- attempts to take Buffy's place in "Enemies." She colludes with Mayor Wilkins, the demonic Mayor of Sunnydale, in a perverted version of Buffy's relationship with Giles, and "(re)turns" Angel to Angelus in order to destroy Buffy. The male figures are pawns in the contest between the two girls, which turns on their interchangeability. Faith castigates Buffy (and ultimately herself), protesting "I'm the Slayer. I do my job, kicking ass better than anyone. What do I hear about everywhere I go? Buffy. So I slay, I behave, I do the good little girl routine. And who does everybody thank? Buffy" ("Enemies" III:17). Faith identifies Buffy's "good girl routine" as a performance. Buffy reveals that this performance of herself, which extends to her playing Faith's victim in order to extract information about the Mayor's plans, is superior to Faith's imitation of her. When Buffy reveals her act, Faith confuses the categories further, saying "You played [i.e., fooled, but also impersonated] me." This confusion manifests in "Graduation Day I" (III:21) when Buffy arrives "dressed up in big sister's clothes" to capture Faith so that Angel can drain her blood, after Faith has shot him with a poison whose only antidote is Slayer blood. Faith escapes, and Buffy "plays" Faith by allowing Angel to drain her, as she had initially intended to replace her body with Faith's. Here, as in "Helpless," it is Buffy's identity as a Slayer, and as a sexualized girl, which results in her abjection.
<15> Buffy comes to realize, as she tells Jonathan in "Earshot," which follows "Enemies," that her life "suck[s]" not despite her physical advantages, but because the they are not as empowering as the American public believes. This is the root of "BtVS"' abjection "beyond the telling," and of its insurgence: the "burden of being beautiful and athletic" is the burden of converting a source of powerlessness into power. As Liz Frost explores, there is an elision between the consumer power of youth in the Western world, and its ideation as physical perfection (54-55). Buffy kicks against this, objecting that inhabiting the glorified body of American youth culture "sucks" -- literally here, as young women are preyed on by vampires. In doing so, she reveals her body as abject, despite its blandishments. She resists this through her Slayer powers, which additionally gives her access to revisionist and variant/occult histories. In "Checkpoint" (V:12), she defends her claim for alternate versions of Rasputin's biography (including the possibility that he was a demon, and part of her area of expertise), by giving a postcolonial revisionist reading of American history:
There was also near consensus about Columbus, you know, until someone asked the Vikings what they were up to in the 1400s, and they're like, "Discovering this America-shaped continent." I just...I'm only saying, you know, it might be interesting, if we came at it from, you know, a different perspective, that's all.
The professor's ridicule cannot detract from this newly empowered Buffy, who not only knows her history, but also the "different perspective" presented by her occult knowledge. Slayers, after all, represent a secret female force that, throughout human history, have borne the burden of the continuation of that history.
<16> At the end of the episode, Buffy presents her experiences at the hands of the hegemony, using her experience of ridicule to contest the Watchers' Council as they attempt to grill her:
No questions you know I can't answer. No hoops, no jumps -- and no interruptions. I've had a lot of people talking at me the last few days. Everyone just lining up to tell me how unimportant I am. I've finally figured out why. Power. I have it. They don't. This bothers them.
Being rendered powerless by authority figures has revealed to Buffy that she is more powerful that they, and moreover, that the hegemony will try and co-opt or deny the power of those that "bother them." This awareness is dependent upon Buffy's newly-acquired understanding of history, which derives from an unexpected source. While Dracula prompted Buffy's research into the Slayer's origins, it is another character that illustrates the instability of personal memory. In "No Place Like Home" (V:5), Buffy discovers that the Key to the universe's many dimensions had been embodied as her younger sister, Dawn, whose surprising arrival at the end of "Buffy vs. Dracula," complete with a lifetime of false memories for all the characters, makes a telling comment on the disjunction between childhood and adolescence.
<17> As Dawn discovers in "Blood Ties" (V:13), there is a significant difference between Buffy's power, which she accurately describes as "I have it. They don't," and Dawn's, which is not hers, but an inaccessible and denaturing part of her. This variant incarnation of adolescent female power occurs as Buffy is moving towards adulthood, and finding integration between her Slayer and human selves. Like her sister, Dawn is both an abstract supernatural force and a teenage girl. Her dual natures are inseparable, created thus so the Slayer will protect her. Selecting the form of a teen girl as most vulnerable underlines the fragility of embodiment that makes Buffy's paradoxical performance of power so attractive. Staging this vulnerability, Dawn summons the spectre of adolescent female self-harm, holding a bloody knife, crying "This is blood, isn't it? It can't be me. I'm not a key. I'm not a thing" ("Blood Ties"). Her discovery of her supernatural nature acts as a powerful allegory and enactment of "adolescence [as] not only a time of changing body shapes, but a time when [girls] are mandated by the culture to change their identities, the essence of who they are and how they take in the world" (Bentley 1999, 214). Dawn's power inheres in her body, but her physical body must be destroyed to access it: her sacrificial bleeding to open the Gate acts as a visual and physical echo of her self-inflicted harm ("The Gift" V:22). The embodied nature of adolescent femininity, of the becoming-female body that menstruates, is coded through Dawn's rejection of the flesh through the flesh. Dawn's power is indexed to Buffy's, but is also different from it: Dawn is helpless by design. Yet her power resides in denying her mystic center, and accepting her invented identity as human, however vulnerable. Dawn's division between Key and girl can be understood through Julia Kristeva's idea that the "abject" is
at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject. (Kristeva 1982, 4)
<18> Both Dawn and Buffy find themselves abjected at the moments in which their bodies fail to cohere their "essence." In "Nightmares" (I:10), Buffy briefly becomes a vampire in a world created by a physically abused boy's nightmare, and experiences the abjection that can be read as underlying the series. In the Buffyverse, a vampire is a human shell inhabited by a demon. Like Angel, Buffy contains both the demon and her soul, her "essence." As for Dawn, this double consciousness provides the root of both the Slayer's and the ensouled vampire's conscience. Kristeva could speak for all three when she writes:
I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be "me." Not at all an other with whom I can identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possessions causes me to be [...] Significance is indeed inherent in the human body. (10)
In the Buffyverse, the human body is often the last refuge of significance: demons desire it, Buffy relies on it. Buffy and Dawn play out the tensions produced by the strong identification in contemporary Western culture between young women and the body. The empowerment that results from possessing the Slayer's body is not unproblematic, while the vulnerability of being incarnated as a teenage girl, worse, as a younger sister, has its own agency.
"This Year's Girl": How Buffy Didn't Save the World
Buffy Anne Summers. She saved the world. A lot.
Legend on Buffy's gravestone, "The Gift" V:22
<19> This relentless emphasis on the Slayer's physical being and/as its abjection is epitomised by Buffy's sacrificial death -- using her blood as/in place of Dawn's blood to seal the dimensional gate -- in "The Gift" (V:22) and her resurrection in "Bargaining I" (VI:1), in which we see her body re-form layer by layer in her coffin. Returned from death not fully human, Buffy enters the liminal state of the abject, "the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite," coming closer than ever to the vampire nature to which Dracula connected her powers (Kristeva 4). In "The Gift" (V:22), Buffy killed herself to save her sister, and the world. When she returned to life, she was no longer a pert adolescent, but in loco parentis for her sister, working a McJob to pay the bills left by her mother's death ("Doublemeat Palace" VI:12). Although she faced several demons, it was rare to see her stake a vamp. More than ever, the supernatural manifested as Buffy's inner demons -- threats of failure in the adult world, such as the employee-eating demon of the "Doublemeat Palace," or representations of a longing to return to adolescence, such as the invisibility ray that released her from responsibilities ("Gone" VI:11).
<20> This nostalgie de la boue was mirrored in the production circumstances of Season Six, which saw "BtVS" leaving The WB, a channel identified with teen shows such as "Dawson's Creek," for the more adult-oriented UPN. While this brought higher production values and an increased licence to the show, it also marked a shift in its identity. If, as Joss Whedon phrased it in "Buffy Lives," "high school is when your life is most like a horror movie," the post-adolescence of Season Six seemed more like a Kafka novel. As Buffy sang in the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling" (VI:7), fighting outer demons had become "going through the motions." In the final episode of the season, trapped in a crater in a graveyard with Dawn, six feet back under the earth, Buffy was powerless to fight the coming apocalypse. For the first time, she was released from responsibility, able to reclaim her sense of being-in-the-world through Dawn's eyes. As she and Dawn battled demons together, she was able to see in her sister the imbrication of adulthood and adolescence, a cohesion disrupted by her own dying into womanhood. Her words to Dawn, "I want to see you grow up. The woman you're going to become. Because she's going to be beautiful. And she's going to be powerful," voice the ideology that twines through the series: the girl is mother to the woman ("Grave" VI:22). Whatever kills her on that journey makes her stronger [3].
"Normal Again": You are Now Leaving Sunnydale
BUFFY: (to Dawn) [...] Those of us who fail history? Doomed to repeat it in summer school.
"Afterlife" VI:3
<21> At her moment of greatest weakness, Buffy has to choose between a world in which she is the Slayer, and one in which -- as the same person -- she is "a sick girl in an institution." In the former, she is "in-between" life and death, adolescence and adulthood. In the latter, she is repressed, drugged and controlled by an institution. Each world reflects the other, and manifests a central question: why would the Buffy of The Asylum, a sixteen-year-old cheerleader with happily married parents and a boyfriend, retreat for six years into a delusional world in which her parents divorced, her mother dies, her boyfriends leave her, and her athleticism is put to use staking the undead. This radical re-presentation of the Buffyverse suggests that being "some kind of super-girl" is empowering not only because it is an egotistical fantasy, but because it converts the beloved attributes of commodity culture -- youth, beauty, athleticism, familial and sexual love -- into agency through their performance against real or threatened loss. In the world of The Asylum, these things are like the Key: they inhere in Buffy, but they do not give her real power. Even before she becomes delusional, she is a "girl in an institution": high school, repeatedly presented in "BtVS" as a microcosm of the patriarchal surveillance system that inscribes its discourse on resistant bodies.
<22> Escaping into her delusions of Sunnydale, Buffy converts her attributes into agency. She sees this agency refracted through the characters of Willow, Faith, and Dawn, whose knowledge, anger, and vulnerability are facets of her character, but also defining characteristics of their own embodiment as adolescent girls. From Faith, Buffy learns the inherent power of her physical and emotional identity, emphasising the "Buffy" in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Dawn allows Buffy to watch her own vulnerabilities replayed "once more, with feeling." Willow tutors Buffy in history, teaching her that reconstruction can begin "after the destruction" ("Angel" I:7). Buffy, in return, tutors Willow in sexuality, teaching her, as she will teach her first doppel-slayer Kendra, that her emotions are "total assets" ("What's My Line II" II:10). This foregrounding of emotion enables Buffy to resist incorporation by patriarchal discourses, and to convert the abject position into which they force her into one of power. Buffy's Slayer powers are connected to her girlhood as a manifestation of "the now," and "the now"'s need to understand its own past. Seeing the Vikings behind Columbus and putting the "'grrr' in 'girl'" are connected as academic strategies. Exploring her affinity with the dead things of history, Buffy increases her power to resist them, even as they are attracted to her. Her appeal to the vampiric academy lies in her resistance to it, the desiring and desirable energy of the adolescent girl sucking in the powers that desire to suck on her.
Notes
[1] Angel to Buffy, "Enemies" III:17. [^]
[2] For some of the questions arising from Buffy's privileged race/class identity, see Patricia Pender, "'I'm Buffy, and You're...History': The Postmodern Politics of Buffy," and Lynne Edwards, "Slaying in Black and White: Kendra as Tragic Mulatta in Buffy" in Wilcox and Lavery 2002, 35-44; 85-97. The concerns addressed there are beyond the scope of this essay, but I am aware of the problematic focus on a normative character as representative of all young women. Buffy's Otherness does not detract from the show's racial politics (or the lack thereof) as addressed polemically by Edwards. [^]
[3] This
is a variant interpretation of the First Slayer's message, "Death is your
gift." Buffy takes this to mean that to kill is her gift, then that to
die is her gift. I think that death gifts her with her strength, both as a Slayer
and as a woman. [^]
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