Dr. Erma Petrova

University of Ottawa

Ottawa, Ontario K1N 8J9

Canada

e_petrova@hotmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Faust Paradigm: Soul-Having in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

[Click on the link above to see this paper's placement in the SCBtVS Program.]

 

This paper proposes to explore what is lost and what is gained in the loss of a soul, using a classical case, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, to inform a reading of the soul in BtVS. Faustus gains relatively little in exchange for his soul, an anti-climax after proposing "to make the moon drop from her sphere, / Or the ocean to overwhelm the world" (iii. 39-42). While Faustus’ apocalyptic vision can be compared to Angelus’ ambition to destroy the world, his actual behavior is similar to Spike’s comfy symbiosis with the world as it is. What Faustus and Angelus "lose" in the transaction of the soul is that there is something in the nature of the power they gain that prevents them from using it. It is a great power, but it remains out of phase with the natural world, never fully applicable to reality. This kind of evil appears structurally inefficient against the good—and in fact we observe that in BtVS apocalypses never actually happen. The answer can be sought in the semiotic nature of (natural) good and (supernatural) evil. What Mephistopheles grants Faustus is not any particular wish, but a potentially omni-applicable (though never actually applied) meta-wish of the type "I wish to have an infinite number of wishes granted," which abandons content in favor of form, the specific wish being supplanted by the process of wishing. Similarly, the actuality of content (a Heideggerian "thrownness" in the world) is a realm of experience lost to vampires the moment they lose their soul, as they exchange content for form (cf. Spike describing himself as a "dead shell" in "Crush" [5.14], and the formalism of vampires in general: they seem to be alive but are not, and seem to die when staked but do not, since they were never alive in the first place). The soul then emerges as a state of being grounded in the actuality of the world, whereas the lack of soul is equivalent to Faustus’ meta-wish, a shift from (human) content to a (non-human) form. Losing the soul means losing the ability to be affected by the contingencies of the world (the ability to be mortal), but also losing the ability to affect the world (the ability to cause it to die).

 

Works Cited

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Creator Joss Whedon. 20th Century Fox Television/Mutant Enemy Inc. WB: 1996-2001, UPN: 2001-2003.

Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Elizabethan and Stuart Plays. Ed. Charles Read Baskervill, Virgil B. Heltzel, and Arthur H. Nethercot. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1934. 349-73.