Assistant Professor
Vanderbilt
German
Box 1567 Station B
Nashville, TN 37235
"Oh Stay! You Are So Beautiful!" Angel the Vampire Faust
[Click on the link above to see this paper's placement in the SCBtVS Program.]
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Of the
clever and often sophisticated allusions in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, many are derived from the German literary and cultural
tradition. The more obvious examples include the retelling of "Hänsel
und Gretel," set in modern Sunnydale, and the transformation of
E.T.A. Hofmann’s "Sandmann" into the demon Kindertod. Even the
music that accompanies the scenes in which Buffy and Angel appear
together, which has recurred leitmotifically and acquired the significance
of forbidden desire, is a clear nod to the compositional technique used by
Richard Wagner as well as to his opera Tristan und Isolde, the
paradigmatic work about prohibited love. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Buffy
has also appropriated the legend of Faust – a
quintessentially German figure – in its characterization of
Angelus/Angel.
My paper examines how the role of the soul in Buffy echoes Goethe’s exploration into the same terrain in his Faust. Rather than a sustained discourse on the metaphysics of the soul, both works use it as a device to mark the boundaries of the phenomenal and to study the human condition. This is underscored by the structural crux set up in both narratives: Angel loses his soul (and reverts back to Angelus) at the precise point he experiences true human happiness, just as Faust loses his when he achieves an experiential – rather than intellectual or sensual – appreciation of human life, uttering to that moment "Oh, stay! You are so beautiful!" In both texts, the metaphysical functions as a means of expressing the idea that the _being_ of human is predicated on its very realization of the limits of humanity. |