Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  In my view, it’s too harsh to say that Ben had an obligation to kill himself. There are many times when individuals sacrifice themselves for the sake of others. We call them heroes, but we don’t say that anyone has an “obligation” to be a hero. We just recognize them for it after the fact. When Ben gave up the fight against Glory and gave Dawn back to her, we know that he’s no hero.

  Trivia notes: (1) SMG was in Australia filming the first Scooby Doo movie at the time TWOTW was shooting. She had only limited time available for this episode. (2) A Kewpie Doll is a child’s toy from the early 20th Century. (3) Spike’s gesture in putting his finger on his nose when Anya seems to understand that Ben is Glory comes from the party game Charades. (4) The man working with the blowtorch when Glory brings Dawn to the tower is the crazy man who approached Dawn in Real Me. (5) Glory’s mention of unleashing Armageddon refers to the Christian belief that a battle at the site of Megiddo (Armageddon) will signal the end of the world. (6) Glory’s words to Dawn hang a lantern on the fact that the two of them have metaphorical roles: “Being human? It's like a costume for girls like you and me. Being something else, *that's* what we are.” (7) When Willow is inside Buffy’s mind, there’s an image of Willow standing by the fire Buffy saw in Intervention. (8) Willow remembers that the First Slayer tried to kill them all in their dreams in Restless. (9) Glory’s description of herself as the “one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind” plays on the aphorism of Desiderius Erasmus that “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” (10) Spike refers to Xander as “Special Ed” which is short for “Special Education”, i.e., what Americans call (or used to call) the classes for the mentally disabled.

  The Gift

  From the moment Buffy has her epiphany on the tower, I start losing it, no matter how often I’ve seen The Gift. Joss Whedon always said that he never worried too much about plot details if he could cut through to the emotional truth. In S5 I think he combined plot and emotional truth incredibly well. While my views on which is the best season are intense but variable, to quote Anya, on a given day S5 is my favorite season.

  I’ll start with the ending, because that’s the whole point of the season. Indeed, it’s the whole point of the series. Buffy’s dive off the tower is the end of her journey. As you know, my view is that Buffy’s journey was one of becoming an adult. As I read it, her dive represents the fact that she’s leaving childhood behind and launching herself into the new dimension of adulthood. James Marsters: “Thematically, I think that [Joss] tied up his original premise, which is how does a young child become an adult and pass through adolescence. And all of us vampires are just metaphors for those problems. I think that in the moment that she sacrificed her life to save her sister she became a true adult.”

  The key (pun very much intended) to the episode is that it finally tells us the answer to the question we should have been asking since Dawn first appeared: who or what is Dawn? I’m talking metaphor here, and so is Buffy when she gives us the answer: “She’s me. … Dawn ... is a part of me. The only part that I --”. To coin a phrase, Dawn is Buffy; Buffy is Dawn.

  This doesn’t mean we have to see Dawn as representing part of what Buffy actually is, though that’s certainly possible. It does mean, at the very least, that we should see Dawn as how Buffy sees herself (in part; Dawn serves more than one metaphorical purpose – see below).

  Now I can revisit the opening episodes to see how they set up this theme and the story line. In The Replacement we saw Xander split in two, creating a competent, mature half and a childish, inept half. Both were Xander, one mature, the other immature. The same principle applies to Dawn and Buffy. Both are Buffy.

  What part of Buffy is Dawn? We can see her as the child part, or perhaps the human part, the vulnerable part of Buffy. The Replacement hinted at this throughout. Aside from the mature/childish contrast, it used key (heh) phrases associated with Dawn. When the two Xanders confronted each other in front of Anya, SuaveXander told his twin “You don’t belong here.” That’s what the crazy man told Dawn in Real Me. Or there’s this: “ScruffyXander [to Willow]: “I get in trouble and Buffy saves me.” That’s what Buffy does with Dawn.

  The whole point of the season is that Buffy needs to learn to incorporate Dawn into her life. In metaphor, she needs to find a way to preserve her childlike innocence as part of her adult persona. It’s something Buffy learns gradually. At the beginning of the season she almost resents Dawn’s presence. She accepts her in Family and takes responsibility for protecting her starting in Shadow and continuing through the rest of the season, even though she doesn’t quite see Dawn as “real”. The uncertainty about Dawn’s existence (references to her as a “shadow”; “am I real?”; all of Blood Ties) are because Buffy’s not sure her human, innocent self still exists after all she’s gone through as the Slayer (Intervention).

  Blood Ties demonstrates Dawn’s reality and Buffy confirms it metaphorically at the end of that episode – “It’s Summers’ blood” – but she doesn’t make the connection in real terms yet. The stress of her mother’s death, on top of everything else she’s been through over the last 5 years, leaves her feeling hard and emotionless, so she treats Dawn harshly in Forever and again with resentment, almost, in Tough Love. That’s exactly the opposite of what she needs to do. That final revelation comes only on the tower.

  The question is, why does Buffy have to learn to keep some part of herself childlike and innocent as she enters adulthood? To answer that we have to talk about what Glory represents.

  It’s never said explicitly, though they drop clues. In IWMTLY Buffy says that “I've had it with super-strong little women who aren't me.” That obviously refers to Glory as well as April, both of whom resemble Buffy in this and other respects. Buffy tells Giles in Family that Glory “was kinda like Cordelia”, expecting us to remember that Cordelia was Buffy’s shadow self, what she could have been: “Before I was the Slayer, I was... Well, I, I don't wanna say shallow, but... Let's say a certain person … we'll just call her Spordelia, looked like a classical philosopher next to me.” (From Helpless.)

  Glory is Buffy’s Slayer side, or at least what Buffy fears her slayer half could make her as an adult: insane and super-powered. Insane because the harsh reality of adulthood is enough to make the whole prospect of adulthood seem crazy, which is why there’s an emphasis throughout the season on the way Buffy and others act crazy, Glory made people crazy, etc. Super-powered because Buffy is. Remember how Riley described what pure SlayerBuffy would be like in The Replacement? “The slayer half would be like slayer concentrate, pretty unkillable.” That pretty much describes Glory.

  As is the case with Dawn, Glory isn’t necessarily what Buffy’s slayer half actually is, but what Buffy fears it could be. Glory – Buffy’s fear of what adulthood might entail – came from out of Buffy’s mind, which is why the episode of that title immediately preceded Glory’s first appearance.

  The net effect of this is that Glory is Buffy too. Glory and Dawn are the two halves of Buffy. One side is how she sees herself, the other is her fear of what becoming an adult might make her. Slayer Buffy needs to avoid becoming a hard, ruthless killer, and she does this by preserving her inner child, her human half. In metaphor, all adults need to preserve their inner child in order to avoid becoming hard and unfeeling as adults. Just as was the case with Xander in The Replacement, Buffy needs both to survive.

  The split personality theme also appears with Glory and Ben. Ben, like Dawn, exists in his current form only as a result of magic, but he represents the opposite side, the wrong path to take. In TWOTW Ben had the chance to protect Dawn, but rejected that route for selfish reasons. We’re supposed to see his failure in stark contrast to Dawn’s willingness to sacrifice herself and Buffy’s actual sacrifice in The Gift. Buffy sacrifices herself for her sister, Dawn was willing to sacrifice herself for the world. Ben refuses to sacrifice himself for anything, not for Dawn and not for the world. Ben represents, ultimately, a selfish form
of adulthood that willingly sacrifices others for its own benefit.

  Now let’s go back and see just how magnificently the season set these themes and brought them to fruition in the plot. In Buffy v Dracula, Drac told Buffy that her power was rooted in darkness and Buffy recognized her fear that being the slayer was making her hard; she needed to understand it better. As it turned out, what she needed was to be able to maintain a connection – to link; “the Key is the link” – to her humanity. That’s introduced at the very end of the episode in the form of Dawn.

  The Knights wanted to “sever” the link because they represent a faction which doesn’t want Buffy to become an integrated, whole adult. If Buffy or any woman became an authentic adult, that would threaten the patriarchal, traditional world view because a woman would be seen as an equal.

  Real Me opens with Buffy seeking her true self: “GILES VOICEOVER: You are the center. And within you, there is the core of your being ... of what you are.” Buffy’s search is interrupted when Dawn interferes, knocking over the crystals and demanding to leave. In part, at least, Dawn is Buffy’s true self, the core of what she is.

  In Real Me, Dawn tells us about herself, but what she’s really telling us all along is about Buffy. That whole episode isn’t about Dawn at all; it’s about how Buffy’s human half sees the world. Think about this language from Dawn’s first voiceover (the first meaningful words we hear her say): “Nobody knows who I am. Not the real me. It's like, nobody cares enough to find out. I mean, does anyone ever ask *me* what I want to do with my life?” That’s Buffy talking about herself.

  If you recall, I made a list of Dawn’s attributes in my post on Real Me. Here they are again: “She keeps a diary. She loves Willow, she loves Xander, she loves her mother. She thinks Giles might not like her because he’s so old, she finds Buffy’s training boring, and she resents the fact that Buffy is always telling her what to do even if, in some sense, she idolizes her sister. She likes Tara, she’s not so sure about Anya. Interestingly, she expresses no opinion about Riley. She feels isolated at times, and she gets to be the child of the family in a way that Buffy wishes she could.”

  Just to tick off quickly the similarities, Buffy kept a diary when she was younger (Angel, Ted); Giles called Buffy to her Slayer destiny in Welcome to the Hellmouth and has pushed her ever since (From Nightmares: “I should have been more c... cautious. Taken more time to train you. But you were so gifted. And the evil was so great.”) As a result, he tends to have little patience for Buffy’s less adult moments (“I'm serious, Buffy, there's going to be far less time for the sort of flighty, frivolous-….” Real Me); Buffy has a mixed relationship with Anya (see, e.g., Superstar or Buffy v. Dracula); Riley is pretty self-explanatory at this point; Buffy’s sense of isolation is well-established; and the whole point of the season is that Buffy needs to overcome the belief that she has to suppress her human/child side in order to become an adult.

  Buffy accepted Dawn into her family in the episode of that name, but she didn’t yet realize Dawn’s importance to her. She wasn’t sure that Dawn was even real. In Blood Ties Dawn cuts herself (prefiguring her fate in The Gift) and asks, “Am I real?”. That’s really Buffy’s question about Dawn; she’s not sure after all these years of Slaying that there’s any humanity left. Buffy may not be sure of her humanity – she’s still unsure in Intervention – but all season long we’re shown that Dawn’s flaws are Buffy’s flaws, her strengths of character are Buffy’s too – think Buffy’s klutziness throwing knives in Helpless or breaking the ice cream machine in The Initiative, “Bitty Buffy’s” courage in Forever. “It’s Summers’ blood.”

  Buffy told Riley in Real Me that “*She* gets to be a kid, and she acts like it's the biggest burden in the world. Sometimes *I* would like to just curl up in Mom's lap and not worry about the fate of the world.” That’s what we all feel like when it comes to growing up. Childhood is simpler; adulthood is scary. It would be so much easier if we could just curl up and let Mom take care of it all. Buffy even tries running away from her destiny, first in Spiral then, a different way, in TWOTW. That’s what we’d all like to do.

  We don’t need to run away from adulthood, though, we need to grow up. What S5 is telling us is that we can preserve some part of our childhood when we do. In fact, it’s essential that we do that (see more below).

  Real Me also set up The Gift in the plot outline. The basic story of Real Me was that Dawn was kidnapped and tied up by an evil blonde woman with super powers who threatened to kill her. That, in substance, was Glory’s plan too. Both whined to Dawn while she was a captive and Harmony promised Spike that Buffy would “be dead by sunrise”.

  Spike’s promise to defend Dawn “till the end of the world” has to be understood in the context of the metaphor. Dawn is Buffy’s human half; Spike has now pledged to defend Buffy’s human self. He’s not in love only with the Slayer, but devoted to the whole of Buffy. It’s interesting, too, that Buffy commends her better half to Spike’s care. Spike had told her in Fool For Love that he would slip in and have himself one good day. Buffy got “that final gasp, that look of peace” and it turned out to be the worst day of his unlife.

  Now let’s look at some of the issues raised by The Gift.

  The One Who Walked Away From Omelas

  Ursula LeGuin wrote the famous short story I’ve linked above (I modified the title slightly to make it refer to Buffy in particular). If you haven’t read it, please do now; it’s very short. I think the connection to the points I’m now going to discuss will be obvious.

  The events of The Gift pose two controversial moral dilemmas, both involving Giles: Should Buffy save Dawn or save the world? Was Giles right to kill Ben? Let’s take them in that order.

  I can understand Giles’s point about Dawn. It’s a standard utilitarian argument: save the greatest number. It seems irrefutable. And the fact that Giles has sent out an innocent (Buffy) every night for 5 years, risking her death to protect the world, means that Giles has come to accept that as part of his role.

  But while I understand Giles, three reasons convince me that Buffy was right about Dawn and he was wrong. First, Joss signaled his own view of the issue in Triangle. There, Xander – Buffy’s metaphorical heart – faced what was structurally the same “Sophie’s Choice” dilemma that Buffy faced in The Gift, when Olaf told him to choose between Willow and Anya. What did Xander do? He refused to choose – “that’s insane troll logic” – even at a cost to himself personally (Olaf broke his arm and threatened to kill him). That’s exactly what Buffy did in The Gift when faced with the choice between Dawn and the world. Buffy wasn’t willing to kill her innocent charge – the Slayer is not just a killer after all – but she was willing to die for her. Killing Dawn turned out to be unnecessary, which is pretty devastating to Giles’s argument.

  Joss: “The question of what is a Slayer which we brought up in the very first episode [i.e., Buffy v. Dracula], what does it mean, does it just mean being a killer? And answering that with “No, it means living in a world where life and death are an issue and putting your life on the line.” That’s what she learns about being a slayer, and it’s a beautiful thing.”

  Second, the plan to kill Dawn was the plan of Gregor and the Knights. Does anyone think they were right after all? That Buffy should have handed Dawn over to them? That Ben was right to kill the mental patients in Listening to Fear? Maybe it’s just me, but Dawn’s life seems a lot more valuable than the lives of those who want to hack her to pieces in order to save their own. The Knights and Glory were both willing to use Dawn as a means to their end; Buffy saw Dawn as an end in herself.

  Dedalus, one of the posters at AtPO, expressed this point very well. After quoting Buffy’s recognition that “she’s me”, he continues:

  “Now compare with our old friend Schopenhauer -

  ‘How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it mov
es me to action? This is something mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation ... This presupposes that I have to some extent identified myself with the other and therewith removed for the moment the barrier between 'I' and 'not-I.' Only then can the other's situation, his want, his need, become mine. I then no longer see him in the way of an empirical perception, as one strange to me, indifferent to me, completely other than myself; but in him I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves.’

  I do think it is profound. A morality that is not forced by external means or threats, but one that truly springs out of a spiritual or psychological realization. It's not a commandment to treat others as you which to be treated, but rather a living impulse after which you cannot help but treat others as you wish to be treated because you and the other are in fact one. The self is transcended and the unity of all life presents itself.

  And isn't this really what was going on in The Gift? If it is, it means Buffy's epiphany is more far reaching than simply what it means to be a Slayer ... it's about what it means to be human. And face it, you just don't get that on most television shows.”

  Karen pointed out in comments that the view of the Knights represents the sin of despair: “I really like the argument that the choice between Dawn and the world (and Xander’s insane troll logic choice between Anya and Willow) is a false choice. And this is where I think the Knights have also put themselves into the position of believing a false directive from their God. They (and Giles) think that the choice is preordained, predestined. Thus they deny free will, the chance for a third unorthodox option. From a Christian point of view, they’ve fallen into the sin of despair, they’ve denied the opportunity for the working of Divine Providence through them by losing faith, in themselves if not in a deity.”