Once upon a time, there was a fair princess. One dark night, some men she thought were pillars of the community took away her voice and put it in a box. She couldn't shout, couldn't cry, couldn't call to mom. Then the gentlemen came by and took out her heart. She remembered later to smash the box and screamed once. The gentlemen all died.

Is this part of the fairy tale that Giles finds in his book in Hush? It is certainly also a vivid image of incest and/or sexual abuse.

This paper argues that a close reading of Hush as an allegory of incest brings some of series' main preoccupations powerfully into focus, most dramatically 'patriarchy' and the relationship between sex, power and language. The very silence of the episode not only allegorises the silencing of women's voices within a 'patriarchal' sexual economy, it also highlights the silencing of any debate about the contingency and historicity of very particular 'set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.' (Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women,’ The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory 1997).

Sources for this paper include second & third wave feminist philosophy, psychoanalytic analysis of fairy tales to representations of incest in the show itself and Buffy fanfic as outlined in Kristina Busse's 'Crossing the Final Taboo: Family, Sexuality and Incest in Buffyverse Fan Fiction' (in Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). It also engages with Holly Chandler's 'Slaying the Patriarchy: Transfusions of the Vampire Metaphor in BtVS' (Slayage Number Nine ).

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