Title-of-Presentation: Alternative realities and dream worlds have consistently held legitimacy and power within the Buffyverse. For example, Vamp Willow from the alternative universe of “The Wish” arrives in the “real” Sunnydale in “Doppelgangland.” Furthermore, although she appears only in their dreams, the first Slayer holds a “real” power over the lives of Buffy, Giles, Willow and Xander in “Restless.” This pattern gives weight to a reading of the season six episode “Normal Again” that interprets Buffy’s delusion of confinement in a mental institution as not simply a hallucination but also as a representation of an alternative reality. Such a reading has implications for the meaning of the Buffyverse and its message of female empowerment. While there is a tradition within feminist criticism of reading female madness as a challenge to the patriarchal order (Gilbert and Gubar), Marta Caminero-Santangelo questions the subversive power of the madwoman and argues that such a reading denies the marginalization that results from being labeled insane: “Madness is not rage or even hate but hopelessness — not a challenge to constraining representations but a complete capitulation to them” (17). Both these readings illuminate important aspects of “Normal Again” because Buffy’s madness can be interpreted from either critical standpoint depending on which universe the viewer assumes is the “real” one. BtVS’s challenge to patriarchy has inspired many feminist readings of the show (e.g. Early, Daugherty, Miller, and Playdon). “Normal Again” prompts us to re-examine Buffy’s engagement with this struggle within the Buffyverse and, quite possibly, without it as well.

Works Cited: Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Daugherty, Anne Millard. “Just a Girl: Buffy as icon.” Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel. Ed. Roz Kaveney. London: Tauris Parke, 2001. 148-165. Early, Frances. “The Female Just Warrior Reimagined: From Boudicca to Buffy.” Athena’s Daughters: Television’s New Women Warriors. Eds. Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. 55-65. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Miller, Jessica Prata. “Buffy and Feminist Ethics.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Loathing in Sunnydale. Ed. James South. Chicago: Open Court, 2003. 35-48. Playdon, Zoe-Jane. “‘What you are, what’s to come’: Feminisms, citizenship and the divine.” Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel. Ed. Roz Kaveney. London: Tauris Parke, 2001. 120-147.