"Tabula Rasa," Northanger Abbey and "Women Warriors"

“Tabula Rasa” and Northanger Abbey both deal with the construction of female heroines. Both Buffy and Catherine are “blank slates” who must be filled with knowledge before they can truly be called heroines. In order to explain Buffy’s “blankness,” the show employs a supernatural force: Willow’s spell. In Northanger Abbey, however, there is no such explanation for how Catherine has reached her seventeenth birthday with nary an opinion of her own, except on the subject of gothic novels. Catherine’s “blankness” is a plot device that serves the narrator’s purpose in creating a comedy of manners.
In “Tabula Rasa,” Buffy is the first to move towards the role she held before the loss of her memory. When the vampires attack the magic shop, Buffy’s body remembers how to fight them, and thus she believes she is a super hero. By being the first character to step up against the vampires, Buffy disrupts, as she often does, the “new war culture” that often “ignored or denigrated women or presented them in conventionally feminine roles (Early 11). Even when she thinks she is “Joan,” Buffy will not inhabit a more “traditional” passive feminine role.
However, as important as defeating the vampires is in “Tabula Rasa,” violence plays a much lesser role in this episode than in earlier episodes. Much more troubling for Buffy is dealing with her personal relationships and feelings: her return to earth, the loss of Giles, her friendship with Willow, and her relationship with Spike. Buffy blends “masculine” and “feminine” roles, therefore becoming an “open-image hero” (Early 24), or a hero who avoids stereotypes. Buffy “beckons us forward, urging viewers to contemplate a refashioned humanitarian and partly androgynous citizen ideal for the twenty first century” (Early 24). Buffy’s “blankness” in the episode allows her to re-inhabit that role after the trauma of her death.
Northanger Abbey cannot be called a “rebel warrior narrative,” which is what Early calls Buffy the Vampire Slayer in her article “Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior.” As it is a comedy, the novel must end with a marriage, presumably the marriage of its protagonist. Thus, Catherine cannot be molded into a “rebel warrior,” as Buffy is, because it is her destiny within the novel to fit into the established social order. The reader spends most of the first part of the novel being frustrated at Isabella’s influence over the incredibly naïve Catherine. However, her initial naiveté makes the eventual union of Catherine and Henry all the more satisfying for the reader.

Early, Frances H. "Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior." Journal of Popular Culture 35.3 (2001): 11-28. Academic Search Premier. Web. 7 Oct. 2011.