Burn Him!!!

In the season three Buffy episode entitled Gingerbread, the viewer encounters the issues that go along with the murder of two children. Distraught over seeing the limp bodies of the two young children, Buffy’s mother starts a witch-hunt in Sunnydale to rid the city of things deemed to be associated with the occult. This episode demonstrates the extreme measures people will go when they feel that the lives of innocents have been unjustly taken. Blinded by the tragedy of the dead children, Buffy’s mother and her torch-carrying horde abandon common sense and attempt to burn Buffy and her friends at the stake, a indication of how far people will go when they are driven by a mob mentality that believes great injustice has occurred. This sort of madness regarding the safety of children also occurs in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, when the governess, losing her grip on reality due to the fact that she feels as though she desperately needs to protect the two children, smothers the young boy by holding him too tightly against her chest. What I believe the authors are saying about this sort of situation is that it has the capacity to inspire madness if obsessed, making the protection of innocence of a child, very difficult business.