Feminism in _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ is widely acknowledged and discussed, usually in relation to Buffy herself. But feminist issues in BTVS are wide-ranging, including not only the feminist problems explicitly recognized as "relevant" to the show's projected demographic of young women--issues like independence, sexual exploration, peer pressure, looks, physical strength, and so on--but also feminist issues that, significantly, come to most women's attention only over time: specifically, in this paper, motherhood. This paper discusses the affective and cognitive role of time, specifically the viewer's temporal experience of episodic narrative development in BTVS, as a framework for evolving personal and cultural expectations of mothers. BTVS uses "history" and "memory" to draw our attention to the ways in which our cultural and personal understandings of motherhood change over time. Our interpretation of the highly mutable character Spike is controlled by flashbacks, seasons, and the progression of individual episodes; the audience is particularly concerned with Spike's relationship to the mother figures Joyce, Drusilla, and--in the pivotal episode 7.17 ("Lies my Parents Told Me"), his own mother.

Joyce's comic ferocity in defending her daughter when Spike first appears (2.3, "School Hard"), evolves into maternal warmth, with Joyce comforting Spike with hot chocolate when he is heartbroken over losing Drisilla (3.8, "Lovers Walk"), and culminates in Spike's gift of flowers for Joyce's funeral (5.17, "Forever"), a gift that other characters interpret as an attempt to seduce Buffy, though Spike vehemently denies this suspicion. Drusilla's relationship with Spike, initially represented as a "Sid and Nancy" story of obsessive romantic love, is later revealed as Oedipal (5.7, "Fool for Love") when the audience is shown that Drusilla is Spike's "sire"--significantly, this discovery comes in the same episode where we see Spike kill two pre-Buffy slayers. Increasingly over the first five seasons, motherhood and sexuality are intertwined through the disruptive and threatening--but also highly attractive--character of Spike, who serves as the point of contact between Joyce's asexual motherhood (her sexual encounters in 2.11, "Ted," and 3.6, "Band Candy" are disruptive and comic) and Drusilla's highly eroticized role as his "sire." The conjunction of these two aspects of motherhood culminates in 7.17, "Lies My Parents Told Me," when the story of Spike's siring takes on additional resonance with the revelation that after Drusilla sired him, he sired his own mother--and subsequently impaled her when, as a vampire, she forces him to confront the erotic and vaginal aspects of his devotion to her ("ever since the day you first slithered from me. . .."). The repressions needed to separate sexual and maternal love fall apart in this episode, in which pre-vampiric William and vampire Spike are shown to have many of the same traits, but Spike refuses to acknowledge the truth of vampire Anne's statements, which he dismisses as "the demon talking, not her."

I argue that the episodic nature of television provides a particularly rich formal milieu for exploring the inconsistencies and contradictions implicit in cultural ideals of, in this case, women and mothers.