The Horror of Blood: Family Relations in BTVS

 

Shannon McRae, SUNY Fredonia

"The Lies that Bind: Sadomasochism and Parental Betrayal in BtVS"

 

This paper focuses on Episode 7.17, "Lies My Parents Told Me," and argues that "The First," from whose deadly control Spike liberates himself in this episode is, in essence, a consummately controlling parent, and that his action culminates the liberation Buffy and Spike initiated with their violent sexual encounters.

 

The Oedipal narrative is the central cliche of popular Freudianism. It dictates that appropriate sexual development involves separation from original parental objects and eventual heterosexual bonding with an appropriate adult other. From the outset, BtVS is founded in Oedipal instability: parental figures (with the exception of Giles) are notoriously unreliable, absent or dangerous, and sexual love is invariably destructive. Near the end of the season, when Joyce dies, Giles goes off to England, Buffy deals with the aftermath of her own death by taking up with Spike in a rough sex extravaganza. While many fans interpreted their liasion as symptomatic of Buffy's postresurrection depression, it was also her first experience with the complexities of adult passion--and as such, a move toward individuation, the truth of her Slayer nature--represented by the dangerous, sometimes murderous First Slayer.

 

As Buffy incorporates the First Slayer into herself, she must necessarily pit herself against the equally murderous First Evil--the shapechanging entity who masquerades as a trusted dead figure (often a parent) in order to exert psychological control over its victim. She cannot overcome the First without Spike's assistance, and he cannot assist until he has freed himself of its influence. Buffy's confrontation with Giles--formerly the only consistently reliable parent figure in her life--with his own lies and authoritarian betrayals, marks her full acceptance of Spike, her adulthood, and her full powers as a Slayer, whose gift is death/jouissance.

Colbey Emmerson, University of Washington:

"Mummy, possess'd: The Horror of Motherly Love in BTVS"

 

This paper is a reading of Joyce's death and short-lived resurrection  as a zombie in Season V. I will discuss various incarnations of the mother as corpse in terms of the Lacanian category of the Real. I'll show that the dead mother is figured in two ways--as a corpse, and as a zombie.  Each addresses a version of the symbolic value of maternity, and Buffy and Dawn's effort to experience their dead mother's love as a Real, as  opposed to symbolic, thing. Paradoxically, motherly love is most vigorously  experienced by encounters with the dead, not the living, mother. I'll  use my reading to make the larger argument that BTVS employs death as a figure for the  Real, mapping that inarticulate category onto everyday life experience.

Tedra Osell, University of Guelph

"'In Many a Scaly Fold': Maternal Love, Maternal Lust, and Temporal  Transformation in BTVS"

 

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.