So after reading Grace's post, I got to thinking...do we perceive these characters, especially these heroines, in a certain way because we are told to think that way? Sorry, that was confusing and probably not proper English. What I mean is that the narrator in Northanger Abbey and the pre-established character traits and the role of the slayer in the fictional history in Buffy shape our perceptions of these characters.
In "Tabula Rasa" each character is given a blank slate, and we see them find their true selves again, hinting to the fact that you can't escape who you are, and that for Buffy, the hero is always inside her. We also see that Willow is still in love with Tara and that Dawn is still as annoying as ever, and that even Giles is the master spell caster in their delirious state. That is great to take from the episode, that you can't escape your true self, I mean, but what about audience perception? I see a lot of you posting here (especially those of you who don't watch the show and saw Willow's transformation as sudden and appalling) about how upset you are with Willow. Some of you forgive her and some of you are calling her selfish, but why do we form these opinions? Well, some people who got attached to sweet and sensitive high school Willow want to forgive her and say it is just a phase, or that she got swept up in something. By giving us this sweet Willow to begin with, and to have her use magic only to help Buffy (honestly, not like she is "helping" Buffy in season six) Joss Whedon established her in the audiences mind as a good friend who wants to do good things. Others say she is selfish, power hungry, and lying to herself and her friends when she says she only needs magic to help. These people have been led by the writers to believe that Willow was once weak and finds strength in her magics. In doing magic, she is finally strong, she can finally be the heroine and save the day, and that is why we see her as self absorbed in this situation.
The same goes for Isabella. We are told from the beginning through the tone of the narrator that Isabella is tiresome and selfish, that she exaggerates how she misses Catherine when really she is only sociable for personal and selfish gain. The narrator shapes our image of her, and perhaps if the story was being told through Catherine's perspective even, we would have seen this selfishness later on and would not have been so predisposed to dislike Isabella.
Then with our heroines, we are certainly led to think what the writers intended us to think. Catherine is blatantly called our heroine, and the narrator builds her up from her plain beginnings to further beauty as she loses her naivety and grows as a woman. In Buffy, we are told that "In each generation a slayer is born, one girl in all the world, the chosen one, she is the slayer" and we are led to believe that all her actions are good and righteous and for the benefit of humanity. But what if we didn't have this perspective, or what if we weren't introduced to Buffy knowing from the show title that she would be the heroine. The more I read of the Gothic, the more I notice things being laid out for the audience or reader in a way that makes things very predictable. I would attribute that to every thing we have read and seen so far this year.
I like what Grace said about making excuses. What makes us form excuses for a character? Do we make excuses for Willow because we have, in a sense, known her longer, or is it because the narration and writing has set it up that way for us? What room for personal interpretation do we actually have in literature and TV like this?
Ideally, our interpretations of a character should be based on their own words and actions independently of the narrative setup. If the portraits we get of characters differ when we incorporate third person narration, then the writing is poor. There can be first person biased narration, but a third person narrator such as the one in Northanger Abbey should not lead us in a different direction than dialogue or characters' actions. As far as making excuses for characters goes, I think we do that when characters have sufficient depth for us to see that they have good parts as well as bad, and we recognize that humans make mistakes, so we can sometimes forgive them in others. These shades of gray are also factors of good writing, but then, what isn't?
ReplyDeleteI think that the problem with the third person narration, in Northanger Abbey and in other texts, is that it seems so blatently biased. Though the story is clearly focused around Catherine, the narrator is necessary for shaping our opinions of the characters in a text like this. For example, if the narrator wasn't biased for James Morland and against Isabella and told us, contrarily, reasons why we should sympathize with Isabella, that would change the story in its entirety, even if the rest of the text, dialogue and perspective, wasn't altered. At least, I believe that. I think that even if we continued to see the story from Catherine's perspective, the narrator helps to shape our personal opinions towards the Thorpes, especially since Catherine is so naive. We get most of our disgust with John and Isabella from the narrator's description and interpretation of the actions. I understand that this is all pointless, as we can't change the story as it is written, but I think there is something to be learned in acknowledging the cruciality of the narrator on the audience, both in TV and in literature.
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