The phenomenon of the "double," which Freud defines as "the doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self" (1), has often been used in literature, and this convention also seems tailor-made for television shows, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that feature elements of fantasy. The double phenomenon recurs throughout Buffy, and Buffy, as the title character, frequently encounters her double(s). Although Buffy scholar Roz Kaveney notes that such "doppelganger plots [...] enhance the show's exploration of moral ambiguity," (2) I argue that narratives of Buffy's doubles also enhance the show's exploration of gender ambiguity. While doubles in literature have traditionally been used as a method to illustrate women's so-called duplicitous nature (3) or to reduce them to objects (4), early twentieth-century women writers, such as Edith Wharton, subverted this trope by employing doubles in their writing as a way to discuss the "woman question" - the "feelings of division" that resulted from the "privileges but also the imprisonment resulting from the idealization of women." (5) Although Buffy was created by a man and often scripted by men, Buffy's many doubles offer a late twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century treatment of the "woman question," or in Buffy's case - as the "one girl, in all the world" (6) - the "girl question."

The depiction of Buffy's multiple doubles, which includes Buffy's fellow Slayers Kendra and Faith, her "sister" Dawn, and her Halloween noblewoman's costume, demonstrates a questioning of previous conventions of "femininity" as represented by female object- and subject-doubles. By rejecting or accepting the alternative roles that her doubles represent, Buffy symbolizes a more flexible, all-inclusive definition of what it means to be a "girl."

Notes

(1) Freud, Sigmund, "The 'Uncanny,'" The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001) 940.

(2) Kaveney, Roz, "She Saved the World. A Lot: An Introduction to the Themes and Structures of Buffy and Angel," Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel, ed. Roz Kaveney (London: Tauris Parke, 2001) 9-10.

(3) Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and The Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 30.

(4) Sapora, Carol Baker, "Female Doubling: The House of Mirth," Papers on Language & Literature 29 (1993): 386.

(5) Sapora 372.

(6) "Welcome to the Hellmouth," Buffy the Vampire Slayer, dir. Charles Martin Smith, writ. Joss Whedon, perf. Sarah Michelle Gellar et al, WB, 10 March 1997.