The thing that struck me most in “Tabula Rasa” was Buffy’s struggle with coming to terms with all that has happened to her (in brief summary: living with the burden of being the slayer, the knowledge that slayers have a much shorter expiration date than regular people, two deaths, a trip to heaven, and then having to crawl out of her own grave after Willow and the Scoobies bring her back.). Catherine and Buffy hardly compare until the memory wipe, during which Buffy becomes the girl she used to be, having to face the horrors of the world for the first time as she realizes she’s not normal. I found her reference to herself as a “superhero” while without her memory to be extremely poignant compared to the curse she has found it to be, disillusioned after years of battle.
This naïveté is mirrored by Catherine Morland’s character, who stumbles through Northanger Abbey, so awkward at time that she even makes me want to blush. She sees the world through the lens of a gothic novel, her imagination enabling her to believe all kinds of fantastical explanations for the world around her. Though I can’t view her as a heroine (what has she done that is truly heroic?) I do acknowledge that, by the end of the novel, she does, in some way, reflect the disillusionment that Buffy regains at the end of “Tabula Rasa.” She must face the fact that life is rather mundane, and that there are people in it who are crueler and more unpleasant than they have any right to be, like Isabella and John Thorpe, and General Tilney. Her world, like Buffy’s, is rather less than she’d hoped.
In addition, I came across Caroline Herman’s article “Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Dichotomy of Self: A Study in the Shadow Selves of Buffy and Spike” while poking around and doing a bit of Buffy research. It intrigued me because of our recent study of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (I know this post is super late, sorry!). It talked about Buffy’s darkness (which Dracula pokes at in “Buffy vs. Dracula,” and I just wanted to briefly discuss it’s view of Spike: “Spike… evolves into Buffy's other half, the part that understands, embraces, drives, and punishes her darkness - a function that transforms Spike into both Buffy's animus and her shadow.” In a way, Spike is Buffy’s Hyde, especially in “Tabula Rasa.” She keeps on denying him and denying the part of herself that is attracted to him, just as Jekyll denies Hyde. But at the end of the episode, she finally gives in. Herman declares “Buffy has never given into her darkness until now, and it liberates her only because she has the comfort of denial; in believing she came back wrong, she's able to think that this is not who she really is,” which I believe is how Jekyll feels about Hyde. By suppressing a part of himself, he comes to think of it as not a part of his true self, which, for him, absolves some of the blame. Buffy similarly excuses the dark part of herself by believing that something went wrong in her resurrection, and using that as an excuse to give in to it.
Source: Herman, Caroline. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Dichotomy of Self: A Study in the Shadow Selves of Buffy and Spike” http://www.watcherjunior.tv/01/herman.php
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