In “Gingerbread,” there is no doubt that Buffy is right, and Sunnydale’s citizens are wrong during the rise of “M.O.O.” While this dynamic is familiar and easy for Buffy viewers to understand, it still represents a reversal of real world expectations. The ragtag group of teenagers (plus Giles) are equipped to solve the world’s problems, while their parents and community members are useless, and in this case, impeding their progress by antagonizing them. While this does seem like a rebellious teenager’s self-pitying fantasy of the world (“My parents are out to get me and they have NO IDEA what’s really going on…”), that’s exactly what makes Buffy’s world so interesting. Because these tensions are so dramatically externalized and the heroes are so unlikely, we are forced to re-evaluate our notions of what the world is like.
“Normal Again” halts this process of re-evaluation by making us wonder if we should return to our pre-Buffy expectations (I can’t help but say that they’re just being meta here by making us re-evaluate our re-evaluations). Of course a teenager and her friends aren’t battling demons and constantly saving the world. That would be ridiculous, she must be imagining all of it. We are given a free pass to explain away all of Buffy’s world and any lessons we may have learned there. We’re given a similar choice in The Turn of the Screw, as we can choose to believe that the governess is crazy. In both cases, however, the ambiguity forces us decide which version of the world we think is real rather than giving us the answer.
So which is actually better and braver, believing the rational, or the fantastical world? When Buffy has to make a choice which world she belongs to, which is the braver choice? If there is no way for her to know which world is actually the real one, I think this question is incredibly difficult to answer. On the one hand, we are taught to live in an empirical world, and to look for rational explanations for everything, which would indicate that Buffy should accept the fact that she has been making up her life as the Slayer. On the other hand, we have seen texts that refute the ability of empiricism to explain the whole world, such as Dracula, where the characters have to take a leap of faith in order to truly understand and defeat their enemies. In such a case, Buffy obviously needs to go with her gut and continue being the Slayer (which she eventually does).
But which world is actually the cop-out—the one in which everything can be rationally explained and anything inexplicable can be dismissed, or the messy, supernatural world of demons and slayers? The fact that both of these worlds seem equally plausible as escapes from the other is unsettling, and this is why I’ve never enjoyed “Normal Again,” although I applaud its brilliance. Once again, “Buffy” has proved to be self-aware enough to show us an important thing that Gothic texts do. They offer us either an escape from the difficulties of reality or a key to expand our horizons and understand the world more clearly, but we can never be sure which. In Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, he sums up this problem really nicely: “Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for” (Dostoevsky). Gothic literature gives us the opportunity to play with and test out our own theories of reality, but any conclusions we draw have to come from ourselves. Ultimately, I think that the best Gothic works serve both purposes of escape and key, and I think that “Buffy” definitely falls into that group.
Works Cited:
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. N.p.: n.p., 2008. Project
Gutenberg. Web. 11 Nov. 2011.
I wrote about a very similar topic for my post on "Normal Again" in terms of the different choices that Buffy faces, but I didn't really address the idea that one choice was braver than the other, which I think is really interesting. I am not sure that I have an answer either, but I'm not sure that qualifying the slayer world as fantasy is sufficient. Although we have endlessly discussed the idea that these Gothic novels and "Buffy" are an escape for the reader/viewer because they represent a fantastical world, I'm not sure that Buffy is really taking the easier route. I think that both of these potential worlds are incredibly challenging for her. On one hand, the world of the Slayer is 'fantastical' and Buffy has immense power, which on a superficial level, would be an escape for anyone. However, the aspect of that world that Buffy is struggling with is her ability to deal with the pressure of having such responsibility, which Joss Whedon has been addressing throughout the 6th season. On the other hand, the world of the mental institution is just as challenging, if not more, because it questions Buffy's reality and existence as she knows it. In this world, she would have to deal with the fact that her life for the past six years had all been part of her imagination. I'm not sure which is the easier choice. For me, I think that the easier choice would have been the world of the slayer, but I think that for Buffy it might have been the mental institute. In that world, her parents were alive and together, the fate of the world wasn't on her shoulders, and she could be 'normal'. The world of the Slayer, however, is fraught with its own issues, many of which are mental (in this season at least). I think that a lot of what Buffy is struggling with is whether or not she truly can exist in the world of the Slayer, something that "Once More with Feeling" addresses more directly. Therefore, I think that Buffy actually makes the harder decision by staying in the world of the slayer because she must deal with what she's struggling with, rather than escaping it by believing that it is all make-believe.
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