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labellementeuseIn the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Doppelgangland”, analyse how images and understandings of gender affect the representation of monstrosity and the abject.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Doppelgangland”, written and directed by Joss Whedon, features a complex exploration of female sexuality and gender roles through the juxtaposition of Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and her vampire doppelganger. Through its presentation of the contradictory and similar roles Willow and Vampire Willow play, the episode explores the monstrous-feminine and the abject in both roles. I will examine Willow's flirtation with rebellion, structured within the patriarchal authority of her high school; analyse Vampire Willow as abjectly monstrous and as socioculturally threatening through her provocative dress and sexualised violence; address the confounded relationship between Willow and her evil self; and finally I will examine the monstrous masculine, as it is demonstrated in the patriarchal figures of the Mayor and Principal Snyder, and Vampire Willow's henchmen.
“Doppelgangland” is the sixteenth episode of the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The vengeance demon Anyanka has been stripped of her powers (In “The Wish”, Season 3, Episode 9) and is determined to restore them. But when her master D'Hoffryn refuses to help her, she turns to Willow. Willow, who has just been forced into helping jock Percy with his homework, and resentful of her reputation as “Old Reliable” (“Doppelgangland”), agrees, but disturbs the spell, bringing an alternate, vampire Willow from the “Wishverse” (Kociemba: 5). Willow is quickly scared out of her rebellion when she meets Wishverse Willow, who is violent and highly sexualised. However, in order to save lives, Willow must impersonate her doppelganger. Eventually, Buffy and the Scoobies defeat Vampire Willow and her quickly-acquired vampire henchmen, but choose to return the alternate Will to her own dimension. Willow decides that the rebellious life is definitely not for her – but changes her mind when Percy, terrified by the alternate Willow, shows up with his homework all done.
Willow is the thematic centre of the episode; it is structured around the journey of her own vacillation between conforming to the expectations of her friends and superiors, and exploring her darker side. As the episode progresses, Willow causes a literal embodiment of her own struggle to be manifested in Wishverse Willow. However, even before the introduction of her doppelganger, she seeks a manageable rebellion of her own. As the episode begins, Willow is shown levitating a pencil. “It's all about emotional control,” she informs Buffy – but when Buffy brings up a sore point, the pencil hurtles inches-deep into a nearby tree trunk. Although this scene is chiefly played for laughs, it nevertheless introduces Willow as a character of some power, with the potential for destructiveness. It is unsurprising, then, that Willow chafes when she is forced by Principal Snyder into “tutoring” her classmate Percy. Snyder eerily pronounces her brains and Percy's “fast break” as “the perfect match,” leading Willow to ask with some trepidation, “You want us to breed?” Although Snyder merely wants Willow to tutor Percy (or, in fact, do his work, as Percy later interprets the meeting) it is no accident that Willow identifies the prevailing heteronormativity of the scene. Willow is subordinate both to Snyder and “lazy, self-involved, and spoiled” Percy – Snyder because he represents the law, and Percy as her social superior as a consequence of his (very male) prowess on the football field. Although neither Snyder nor Percy are strictly monstrous, they exert dominance over Willow as a consequence of their own social power, and Willow's retiring, accommodating behaviour. This dominance is the catalyst for Willow's emergent rebellion.
Willow's accommodating behaviour is easily identified as a signal of obedience to a gender role. She dresses conservatively, in a pink jersey and skirt covered, almost to the ridiculous, with daisies and butterflies; she defers to male superiors (as well as her friend Buffy) such as Snyder, Percy, and even Buffy's watcher, Giles.1 Her obedience is gendered by her own dress, a fact Willow herself is aware of: responding angrily to Buffy when she refers to Willow as “Old Reliable,” Willow threatens to “change [my] look or cut class.” Nevertheless, her first rebellion is as small as deciding to eat a snack before lunchtime. This demonstrates the elaborate and confining rule-structure that surrounds Willow: the simple act of eating a banana is sufficient to render herself abject in her own eyes. Barbara Creed quotes Julia Kristeva: “Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject...” (Creed: 30, emphasis mine). Willow is hyperaware of strictures, but is self-conscious and resentful of her own awareness, to the point that she deliberately toys with abjectivity.
Willow's desire to violate social norms leads her, in this episode, to bring forth a literal expression of her own abjectivity and abject desires. She is willing to help Anya with “the Black Arts,” engaging in witchcraft as a deliberate transgression. The witch, of course, is a stereotype deeply bound up in notions of the rebellious and dangerous woman [REFERENCE]: Willow's eagerness to perform witchcraft is an eagerness to reclaim her own power, in something she is deeply connected to outside the structure of school and the rules imposed on her by her social and gendered roles. Caroline Ruddell writes that Willow's use of magic is an attempt to “establish a secure identity” (Ruddell: 2); her witchcraft is a security because it is ascribed to her by her friends or by the school. However, Willow's mutiny is brought to its limits when she sees flashes of the Wishverse, an “evil Hell-dimension,” during the spell. Declaiming that “that's a little Blacker than I like my Arts!”, Willow clearly delineates her own rebellion, and the degree to which she is willing to explore her darker side. (Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be aware that Willow rapidly sheds these limits: by the sixth season of the show Willow's power is so great, and her moral compunction so eroded, that she nearly destroys the world.) Ironically, in the process of rejecting these actions, she brings forth their very embodiment: her doppelganger, Vampire Willow from the Wishverse.
“The corpse is ... utterly abject,” Creed writes (Creed: 39); vampires, as living corpses, are doubly abject, both drawing attention to mortality and violating natural law, being animate yet dead. Vampire Willow is the ultimate expression of the abjection and rebellion Willow toys with. Indeed, she is a literal example of Freud's “toothed vagina” (Creed: 35). As all vampires do, Wishverse Willow gives birth through her fanged mouth, where she also feeds and kills. Moreover, vampire “birth” involves a dislocation of personality; the former human's soul is killed, but her body is taken, along with her memories and aspects of her character (a fact Willow attempts to reject.) Vampire Willow's very existence violates and transgresses, and therefore terrifies. In one scene, she offers to turn a group of hostages into vampires: she literally threatens to give birth to them, which (combined with her provocative dress and highly sexualised manner) further complicates her abjection as the desired mother, the spectre of incest.
Vampire Willow's sexuality is not only terrifyingly abject, it is socioculturally threatening. Demure Willow, with her cutesy, high-necked outfits, is highly gendered yet decidedly asexual: she is girl, but not woman. On the other hand, “'bad' Willow... is negatively coded by her sultry appearance.” (Battis, 5) Vampire Willow is not only highly sexualised (“Gosh, look at those!” remarks Willow, noticing how Vampire Willow's corseted attire emphasises her breasts) but also powerful, even deviant. Rather than being the pallid, helplessly seductive victim-woman, Wishverse Willow parodies the defenceless girl while demonstrating an aggressive, very un-childlike sexuality and propensity towards violence. “The world's no fun anymore,” she pouts; “we're going to make it the way it was” -- which is to say, a world where “there are people in chains, and we can ride them like ponies.” This transparently deviant sexuality not only threatens the role of the woman in heteronormative relationships; it also threatens the sanctity of vanilla sexuality, and violates the viewer's preconceived notions of Willow. When Vampire Willow throws Percy around at the Bronze, or tortures vampires in an alley, she uses Willow's face to do it with. The juxtaposition of her familiar, pretty face (Battis, 6) with her violent actions is sufficient to startle and frighten the audience, making her monstrous as a perversion of Willow – and a perversion of Willow's perceived roles in the world, that is to say, her femininity. Although Wishverse Willow plays the girl-child, where she is violent she is masculine: she kicks, punches, and fights in the same way the men do, lifts Percy off the ground and throttles him, and displays none of the acrobatics and graceful choreography of Buffy's violence.
Vampire Willow, then, is the epitome of the “nasty girl” described by Barron and Lacombe. It is no accident, either, that her leather outfit recalls both sadomasochistic sexual play (Call: 12) and the season's explosive “nasty girl” Faith. (Levy: 14). According to Barron and Lacombe, the notion of the “nasty girl” is an artificial concept developed as a consequence of moral panic. The little girl playing house, domesticated and maternal, is replaced by young women who “'celebrate materialism, aggressive sexuality and nasty behaviour ...'” (Barron and Lacombe: 53.) The “nasty girl” represents fears that feminism has created a young woman no longer confined to her stereotypical social role (ibid). The relationship between little-girl Willow (emphasised by her dress and graceless, “gawky” motion throughout the episode (Kociemba: 10)) and dangerous, violent Vampire Willow can, therefore, be characterised as an uneasy movement between Willow-the-good-girl and Willow-the-nasty-girl.
When Willow first meets her vampire counterpart, unsurprisingly she reacts with shock and distaste. “I'm so evil, and skanky. And I think I'm kinda gay!” she remarks to Buffy. She quickly attempts to disclaim any similarity between herself and Wishverse Willow, who performs the same distancing: “Well look at me. I'm all... fuzzy,” she sneers. However, the fact that both Willows are intimately related, and each informs the other (Battis: 17), becomes more and more clear as the episode progresses. Angel points out (although he is quickly hushed) that a vampire's personality has a lot to do with the human personality that originally previously inhabited the body. Throughout the show, vampire personalities deliberately seek to reject or subvert their previous existence. In one of the earliest episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the dorky, ill-fated Jesse is turned, and immediately rejects his previous social incapacities, proclaiming himself “a new man.” (“The Harvest”: Season 1, Episode 2.) When shy, inarticulate poet William is turned, he becomes Spike, funny and charmingly evil, as well as violent. (“Fool for Love”: Season 5, Episode 7.) However, neither Spike nor Jesse are as separate from their previous selves as they might seem: Spike's emotional connection to his mother leads him to first turn, and then kill her, while one or Jesse's first moves as a vampire is to use his newfound social confidence to dance with the popular Cordelia. Similarly, the dominating, violent Vampire Willow is an expression of Willow's own repressed desires. The revulsion Willow expresses merely serves to confirm the depth of her own repression (Call: 13), as the show eventually made very clear. Willow in later seasons is both gay and, intermittently, very violent indeed.
The boundaries between Willow and Vampire Willow blur even further as the episode continues. In order to save human hostages, Willow must impersonate Vampire Willow, and they swap costumes. As the audience watches Hannigan's performances of Willow-playing-evil and Vampire Willow-playing-good, they understand both roles as performances of a sort (Kociemba: 10). Willow plays Vampire Willow, but she also plays Willow herself – the Willow that conforms to an elaborate set of rules, both her own and those imposed on her from outside. Similarly, Vampire Willow's aggressive, Lolita-esque sexuality is a performance she uses to manipulate. She literally plays and parodies herself in a scene in the Bronze, using childlike language with violence to inspire fear in her audience. “If you're all good boys and girls, we'll make you young and strong forever and ever,” she says, before “vamping out” and killing a bystander. What is monstrous in her performance is not, or not only, her yellow eyes and hollowed, inhuman face; it is the juxtaposition of that face with her girlish, pretend-harmless manner.
The ways in which the contrast between accommodating Willow and defiant, evil Willow is highly gendered are most perfectly illustrated in the scene where the two Willows first confront each other. Vampire Willow stands behind Willow, taking the threatening position of the male antagonist in the slasher film, pressing her hand over Willow's mouth. Willow is cast in the role of the victim, yielding to Vampire Willow's gaze, even hypnotised by it, and passively moving wherever she is directed to. Vampire Willow even licks Willow's neck, threatening to bite or penetrate: she is performing the dominating, violating, and desiring male gaze of the slasher film in the same way she performs her little girl parody (Karras, 12)2. Willow's willingness to abide and obey is clearly cast as a consequence of a concept of femininity that has been forced on her, while Vampire Willow has entirely abandoned that femininity.
Wishverse Willow's rejection of tame femininity is part of what makes her behaviour monstrous – yet vitally, Willow rejects it as well. She seems to contradict herself, on the one hand crying “I'm a bloodsucking fiend: look at my outfit!” (leather pants and a low-cut black corset) while on the other hand embracing Vampire Willow's ability to defy rules imposed on her by her gender. In a remarkable moment of confusion, Willow, playing Vampire Willow, expresses her distaste towards her own accommodating personality. Rather than directing her resentment at the structures of her school and relationships which confine her to her role as Willow-the-good-girl, she says “[I] bothered me... [I'm] always letting people walk all over [me.]” This is the moment where Willow seems most genuine as Vampire Willow, expressing her contempt towards good girl Willow, a “fuzzy” “doormat”. Willow's play at being Vampire Willow allows her to express her own anger and identify the elements of her own personality and character that most bother her. As much as Vampire Willow's violent sexuality and provocative behaviour are condemned, Willow's desire to replicate them is not. Towards the end of the episode, Willow is ready to disclaim her own rebellion in order to distance herself from Vampire Willow: “I feel like staying at home... and dying a virgin. ... [Wishverse Willow] messed up everything she touched.” However, she changes her mind when Percy, who had been terrified by Vampire Willow, comes up and explains humbly that he's done exactly what she asked him to do. This scene rescues the episode from being a simple expression of societal fear of the assertive woman. Instead, the episode presents Willow with a warning about her own potential for violence, but encourages her to defy her own social conditioning. Although Vampire Willow remains unredeemed, by the end of the episode she is not so straightforwardly monstrous, either: Willow's ambivalence forces the audience to understand Vampire Willow, and her violation of gender roles, as more complex than simple evil.
“Doppelgangland”'s displays, and criticisms, of gendered roleplay do not end with Willow. Faith, the rogue Slayer, appears only briefly in this episode - unsurprisingly, since her volatility and violence are expressed very well in Wishverse Willow. Both sport fetishist leather outfits, both combine sex with violence, and both threaten and confound the Scooby Gang – Vampire Willow as a challenge to Willow's persona, and Faith as a challenge to Buffy, her own (slightly less literal) doppelganger. A heavy Faith presence in this episode would be overkill. However, in one brief scene, “Doppelgangland” offers the audience the chance to see a different side of Faith, as well as a different understanding of gender. In her scene with the Mayor, we see Faith drop her rebellious and violent persona to play the grateful daughter to the Mayor's heavy-handed “family man.” In his scenes, the Mayor, who is several hundred years old, and “built [Sunnydale] for the demons” (“Enemies”, Season 3 Episode 17), represents the patriarchy: the town is literally structured to benefit him and Sunnydale's resident demon population, and he is a traditionalist and spokesperson for “family values.” He behaves paternally towards Faith and, indeed, most of his minions (Chandler, 6-7). Faith plays up to this, gleefully bouncing on the bed as he tells her to take her shoes off; when she attempts to sexualise their relationship, calling him “sugar daddy,” he firmly reminds her that he is a family man, a caring father figure. However, despite his overt appearances, the Mayor is the most monstrous character of the episode, and indeed of the season. The audience's attention is drawn to his hypocrisy first by Faith's strange metamorphosis, and then as he cheerfully declares his intentions to have Willow murdered. The scene draws attention to the fact that, just as Faith's actions in this scene are a performance of gender, so are the Mayor's; his benevolent, patriarchal father act is as dangerous, even monstrous, as Vampire Willow's girlish performance. Patricia Pender argues that feminist camp “foregrounds the inevitably performative nature of gender role playing” (Pender: 39): in this way, Faith and the Mayor serve to highlight the artificiality of heteronormative roles.
There are parallels for Faith and the Mayor's dialogue in two other pairings: Willow and Snyder, and Anyanka and D'Hoffryn. Both Willow and Anya are submissive to a male figure: Anya must appeal to D'Hoffryn to retrieve her agency, the power she uses to avenge women wronged by men, while Snyder forces Willow to waste her time on Percy's homework. Ironically, the most outwardly monstrous of the three, D'Hoffryn the demon lord, is condemned the least. D'Hoffryn's rejection of Anya is frank and not grounded in any kind of gender play: indeed, it is almost entirely impersonal. Anya's powers were taken away from her by Buffy (“The Wish”); it is her responsibility, not his, to retrieve them. Meanwhile, Snyder takes frank advantage of both the school's power structure and Willow's accommodating nature to coerce her, and his scene is grounded in the language of the heteronormative discourse. Yet somehow, Snyder still comes out ahead of the Mayor by virtue of his sincerity. Snyder is open in his dislike of Percy and is frank about his manipulation of Willow. Although he requires her to perform certain activities, unlike the Mayor he does not perform any kind of gender roleplay, or require it of Willow; his gaze is firmly asexual and his intentions are unpleasant, but also open. The Mayor, visually the most appealing of the three (D'Hoffryn is a disfigured demon, while Snyder is short and his features are reminiscent of a goblin) is nevertheless the most monstrous in his interactions with Faith.
The masculine monstrous is depicted and opposed in one final way. The keystone concept of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (according to Joss Whedon, quoted in Chandler, paragraph 1) is contained (even satirised) in a short scene: a group of male vampires, sent after Willow, stumble instead on Vampire Willow, who proceeds first to incapacitate them and then torture them into subservience. Susan Owen describes scenes like this – usually featuring Buffy as the blonde victim-turned-avenger – as a “gleeful[...] transpos[ition]” (Owen: 25). As the male vampires stride down the alley towards the apparently defenceless Willow, though, they represent the ultimate in the monstrous masculine, the rapist and violent attacker. Their vampiric masks demonstrate a kind of arousal (Owen: 28), their fangs ready to penetrate and kill the ultimate victim, the woman alone.
“Doppelgangland” plays with and performs images and understandings of gender and gendered roles in order to first produce, and then compromise, notions of the monstrous feminine. Willow's doppelganger, Vampire Willow from the Wishverse, represents societal fears of the “nasty girl” as well as being a fundamentally abject, and therefore horrific, creature. Yet Willow's ambivalence towards Vampire Willow asks the audience to question her monstrosity, and wonder whether the forces of traditional heteronormative gender roles are equally monstrous as they confine Willow. The theme of challenging patriarchal pressures is elaborated on as the Mayor reveals himself to be both the bastion of traditionalism and the enabler of the monstrous, and the monstrous masculine is explored (albeit briefly)in the violence of the male vampire. “Doppelgangland”'s vivid villain, Wishverse Willow, is a memorable expression of the monstrous-feminine, the receptacle of psychological and sociological fear of the powerful woman; yet a deeper analysis of the text reveals that Vampire Willow's monstrous-feminine is challenged and questioned, even as the monstrous-masculine is less overtly, but also less ambivalently, condemned.
1 Ironically, even as Willow complains that Snyder “thinks everybody's time is his,” she is happy to obey Giles' peremptory instructions to “get on the computer.” Perhaps this is because Giles is a “decidedly feminized male” (Owen: 24) and she fails to recognise him as part of the male-dominated structure she is opposing. More likely, though, Willow simply likes Giles better, and is more willing to devote her time to something that emphasises and challenges her special talents – computer programming, rather than tutoring.
2 Vampire Willow is a woman, and her gaze would normally be considered a female gaze; Karras' article details the ways in which granting a woman, Buffy, her own gaze in an horror show creates her as a revolutionary female character (paras. 11-12). Buffy's ability to “look back” (ibid) enables her to defeat the generally masculinised vampires. However, the positioning of Vampire Willow in this scene, and Willow's role, means that Vampire Willow can be seen as adopting the male gaze, at least temporarily.
Works Cited
Barron, Christie and Dany Lacombe. “Moral Panic and the Nasty Girl.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. 42(1): 51-70.
Battis, Jes. “She's Not All Grown Yet: Willow as Hybrid/Hero in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 8 (Vol. 2, Issue 4.)
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage8/Battis.htm
Call, Lewis. “'Sounds Like Kinky Business to Me': Subtextual and Textual Representations of Erotic Power in the Buffyverse.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 24 (Vol. 6, Issue 4.)
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage24/Call.htm
Chandler, Holly. “Slaying the Patriarchy: Transfusions of the Vampire Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 9 (Vol. 3, Issue 1.)
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage9/Chandler.htm
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection.” In B.K. Grant (ed.): The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (pp. 35-65). Austin: University of Texas Press.
“Doppelgangland.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 23 February, 1999
“Enemies.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 16 March, 1999.
“Fool for Love.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 14 November, 2000.
Karras, Irene. “The Third Wave's Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Thirdspace. Vol. 1 Issue 2.
http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/karras.htm
Kociemba, David. “'Where's the fun?': Comic Apocalypse in 'The Wish.'” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 23 (Vol. 6, Issue 3.)
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage23/Kociemba.htm
Owen, A. Susan. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Vampires, postmodernity and postfeminism.” Journal of Popular Film & Television, 27(2): 24-31.
Levy, Sophie. “'You still my girl?': Adolescent femininity as resistance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Reconstruction. 3(1).
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/031/levy.htm
Pender, Patricia. “'I'm Buffy and You're... History': The postmodern politics of Buffy.” In R. Wilcox & D. Lavery (eds.), Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (pp 35-44). NY: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ruddell, Caroline. “'I am the Law' 'I am the Magics': Speech, Power, and the Split Identity of Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 20 (Vol. 5, Issue 4).
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage20/Ruddell.htm
“The Harvest.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 10 March, 1997.
“The Wish.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 8 December, 1998.
Note: web-based articles are cited by paragraph, rather than page.
*whew* I started this days ago and I've still got to pick up an extra reference to have it finished by five tonight. SIGH. If anyone could point out any little incoherencies, I'd be most grateful. I finished this at 11:30 last night, but I didn't feel really lucid till 11 - I tried to be good and do it ahead of time, how come I can only write carefully past 11?
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Doppelgangland”, written and directed by Joss Whedon, features a complex exploration of female sexuality and gender roles through the juxtaposition of Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and her vampire doppelganger. Through its presentation of the contradictory and similar roles Willow and Vampire Willow play, the episode explores the monstrous-feminine and the abject in both roles. I will examine Willow's flirtation with rebellion, structured within the patriarchal authority of her high school; analyse Vampire Willow as abjectly monstrous and as socioculturally threatening through her provocative dress and sexualised violence; address the confounded relationship between Willow and her evil self; and finally I will examine the monstrous masculine, as it is demonstrated in the patriarchal figures of the Mayor and Principal Snyder, and Vampire Willow's henchmen.
“Doppelgangland” is the sixteenth episode of the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The vengeance demon Anyanka has been stripped of her powers (In “The Wish”, Season 3, Episode 9) and is determined to restore them. But when her master D'Hoffryn refuses to help her, she turns to Willow. Willow, who has just been forced into helping jock Percy with his homework, and resentful of her reputation as “Old Reliable” (“Doppelgangland”), agrees, but disturbs the spell, bringing an alternate, vampire Willow from the “Wishverse” (Kociemba: 5). Willow is quickly scared out of her rebellion when she meets Wishverse Willow, who is violent and highly sexualised. However, in order to save lives, Willow must impersonate her doppelganger. Eventually, Buffy and the Scoobies defeat Vampire Willow and her quickly-acquired vampire henchmen, but choose to return the alternate Will to her own dimension. Willow decides that the rebellious life is definitely not for her – but changes her mind when Percy, terrified by the alternate Willow, shows up with his homework all done.
Willow is the thematic centre of the episode; it is structured around the journey of her own vacillation between conforming to the expectations of her friends and superiors, and exploring her darker side. As the episode progresses, Willow causes a literal embodiment of her own struggle to be manifested in Wishverse Willow. However, even before the introduction of her doppelganger, she seeks a manageable rebellion of her own. As the episode begins, Willow is shown levitating a pencil. “It's all about emotional control,” she informs Buffy – but when Buffy brings up a sore point, the pencil hurtles inches-deep into a nearby tree trunk. Although this scene is chiefly played for laughs, it nevertheless introduces Willow as a character of some power, with the potential for destructiveness. It is unsurprising, then, that Willow chafes when she is forced by Principal Snyder into “tutoring” her classmate Percy. Snyder eerily pronounces her brains and Percy's “fast break” as “the perfect match,” leading Willow to ask with some trepidation, “You want us to breed?” Although Snyder merely wants Willow to tutor Percy (or, in fact, do his work, as Percy later interprets the meeting) it is no accident that Willow identifies the prevailing heteronormativity of the scene. Willow is subordinate both to Snyder and “lazy, self-involved, and spoiled” Percy – Snyder because he represents the law, and Percy as her social superior as a consequence of his (very male) prowess on the football field. Although neither Snyder nor Percy are strictly monstrous, they exert dominance over Willow as a consequence of their own social power, and Willow's retiring, accommodating behaviour. This dominance is the catalyst for Willow's emergent rebellion.
Willow's accommodating behaviour is easily identified as a signal of obedience to a gender role. She dresses conservatively, in a pink jersey and skirt covered, almost to the ridiculous, with daisies and butterflies; she defers to male superiors (as well as her friend Buffy) such as Snyder, Percy, and even Buffy's watcher, Giles.1 Her obedience is gendered by her own dress, a fact Willow herself is aware of: responding angrily to Buffy when she refers to Willow as “Old Reliable,” Willow threatens to “change [my] look or cut class.” Nevertheless, her first rebellion is as small as deciding to eat a snack before lunchtime. This demonstrates the elaborate and confining rule-structure that surrounds Willow: the simple act of eating a banana is sufficient to render herself abject in her own eyes. Barbara Creed quotes Julia Kristeva: “Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject...” (Creed: 30, emphasis mine). Willow is hyperaware of strictures, but is self-conscious and resentful of her own awareness, to the point that she deliberately toys with abjectivity.
Willow's desire to violate social norms leads her, in this episode, to bring forth a literal expression of her own abjectivity and abject desires. She is willing to help Anya with “the Black Arts,” engaging in witchcraft as a deliberate transgression. The witch, of course, is a stereotype deeply bound up in notions of the rebellious and dangerous woman [REFERENCE]: Willow's eagerness to perform witchcraft is an eagerness to reclaim her own power, in something she is deeply connected to outside the structure of school and the rules imposed on her by her social and gendered roles. Caroline Ruddell writes that Willow's use of magic is an attempt to “establish a secure identity” (Ruddell: 2); her witchcraft is a security because it is ascribed to her by her friends or by the school. However, Willow's mutiny is brought to its limits when she sees flashes of the Wishverse, an “evil Hell-dimension,” during the spell. Declaiming that “that's a little Blacker than I like my Arts!”, Willow clearly delineates her own rebellion, and the degree to which she is willing to explore her darker side. (Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be aware that Willow rapidly sheds these limits: by the sixth season of the show Willow's power is so great, and her moral compunction so eroded, that she nearly destroys the world.) Ironically, in the process of rejecting these actions, she brings forth their very embodiment: her doppelganger, Vampire Willow from the Wishverse.
“The corpse is ... utterly abject,” Creed writes (Creed: 39); vampires, as living corpses, are doubly abject, both drawing attention to mortality and violating natural law, being animate yet dead. Vampire Willow is the ultimate expression of the abjection and rebellion Willow toys with. Indeed, she is a literal example of Freud's “toothed vagina” (Creed: 35). As all vampires do, Wishverse Willow gives birth through her fanged mouth, where she also feeds and kills. Moreover, vampire “birth” involves a dislocation of personality; the former human's soul is killed, but her body is taken, along with her memories and aspects of her character (a fact Willow attempts to reject.) Vampire Willow's very existence violates and transgresses, and therefore terrifies. In one scene, she offers to turn a group of hostages into vampires: she literally threatens to give birth to them, which (combined with her provocative dress and highly sexualised manner) further complicates her abjection as the desired mother, the spectre of incest.
Vampire Willow's sexuality is not only terrifyingly abject, it is socioculturally threatening. Demure Willow, with her cutesy, high-necked outfits, is highly gendered yet decidedly asexual: she is girl, but not woman. On the other hand, “'bad' Willow... is negatively coded by her sultry appearance.” (Battis, 5) Vampire Willow is not only highly sexualised (“Gosh, look at those!” remarks Willow, noticing how Vampire Willow's corseted attire emphasises her breasts) but also powerful, even deviant. Rather than being the pallid, helplessly seductive victim-woman, Wishverse Willow parodies the defenceless girl while demonstrating an aggressive, very un-childlike sexuality and propensity towards violence. “The world's no fun anymore,” she pouts; “we're going to make it the way it was” -- which is to say, a world where “there are people in chains, and we can ride them like ponies.” This transparently deviant sexuality not only threatens the role of the woman in heteronormative relationships; it also threatens the sanctity of vanilla sexuality, and violates the viewer's preconceived notions of Willow. When Vampire Willow throws Percy around at the Bronze, or tortures vampires in an alley, she uses Willow's face to do it with. The juxtaposition of her familiar, pretty face (Battis, 6) with her violent actions is sufficient to startle and frighten the audience, making her monstrous as a perversion of Willow – and a perversion of Willow's perceived roles in the world, that is to say, her femininity. Although Wishverse Willow plays the girl-child, where she is violent she is masculine: she kicks, punches, and fights in the same way the men do, lifts Percy off the ground and throttles him, and displays none of the acrobatics and graceful choreography of Buffy's violence.
Vampire Willow, then, is the epitome of the “nasty girl” described by Barron and Lacombe. It is no accident, either, that her leather outfit recalls both sadomasochistic sexual play (Call: 12) and the season's explosive “nasty girl” Faith. (Levy: 14). According to Barron and Lacombe, the notion of the “nasty girl” is an artificial concept developed as a consequence of moral panic. The little girl playing house, domesticated and maternal, is replaced by young women who “'celebrate materialism, aggressive sexuality and nasty behaviour ...'” (Barron and Lacombe: 53.) The “nasty girl” represents fears that feminism has created a young woman no longer confined to her stereotypical social role (ibid). The relationship between little-girl Willow (emphasised by her dress and graceless, “gawky” motion throughout the episode (Kociemba: 10)) and dangerous, violent Vampire Willow can, therefore, be characterised as an uneasy movement between Willow-the-good-girl and Willow-the-nasty-girl.
When Willow first meets her vampire counterpart, unsurprisingly she reacts with shock and distaste. “I'm so evil, and skanky. And I think I'm kinda gay!” she remarks to Buffy. She quickly attempts to disclaim any similarity between herself and Wishverse Willow, who performs the same distancing: “Well look at me. I'm all... fuzzy,” she sneers. However, the fact that both Willows are intimately related, and each informs the other (Battis: 17), becomes more and more clear as the episode progresses. Angel points out (although he is quickly hushed) that a vampire's personality has a lot to do with the human personality that originally previously inhabited the body. Throughout the show, vampire personalities deliberately seek to reject or subvert their previous existence. In one of the earliest episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the dorky, ill-fated Jesse is turned, and immediately rejects his previous social incapacities, proclaiming himself “a new man.” (“The Harvest”: Season 1, Episode 2.) When shy, inarticulate poet William is turned, he becomes Spike, funny and charmingly evil, as well as violent. (“Fool for Love”: Season 5, Episode 7.) However, neither Spike nor Jesse are as separate from their previous selves as they might seem: Spike's emotional connection to his mother leads him to first turn, and then kill her, while one or Jesse's first moves as a vampire is to use his newfound social confidence to dance with the popular Cordelia. Similarly, the dominating, violent Vampire Willow is an expression of Willow's own repressed desires. The revulsion Willow expresses merely serves to confirm the depth of her own repression (Call: 13), as the show eventually made very clear. Willow in later seasons is both gay and, intermittently, very violent indeed.
The boundaries between Willow and Vampire Willow blur even further as the episode continues. In order to save human hostages, Willow must impersonate Vampire Willow, and they swap costumes. As the audience watches Hannigan's performances of Willow-playing-evil and Vampire Willow-playing-good, they understand both roles as performances of a sort (Kociemba: 10). Willow plays Vampire Willow, but she also plays Willow herself – the Willow that conforms to an elaborate set of rules, both her own and those imposed on her from outside. Similarly, Vampire Willow's aggressive, Lolita-esque sexuality is a performance she uses to manipulate. She literally plays and parodies herself in a scene in the Bronze, using childlike language with violence to inspire fear in her audience. “If you're all good boys and girls, we'll make you young and strong forever and ever,” she says, before “vamping out” and killing a bystander. What is monstrous in her performance is not, or not only, her yellow eyes and hollowed, inhuman face; it is the juxtaposition of that face with her girlish, pretend-harmless manner.
The ways in which the contrast between accommodating Willow and defiant, evil Willow is highly gendered are most perfectly illustrated in the scene where the two Willows first confront each other. Vampire Willow stands behind Willow, taking the threatening position of the male antagonist in the slasher film, pressing her hand over Willow's mouth. Willow is cast in the role of the victim, yielding to Vampire Willow's gaze, even hypnotised by it, and passively moving wherever she is directed to. Vampire Willow even licks Willow's neck, threatening to bite or penetrate: she is performing the dominating, violating, and desiring male gaze of the slasher film in the same way she performs her little girl parody (Karras, 12)2. Willow's willingness to abide and obey is clearly cast as a consequence of a concept of femininity that has been forced on her, while Vampire Willow has entirely abandoned that femininity.
Wishverse Willow's rejection of tame femininity is part of what makes her behaviour monstrous – yet vitally, Willow rejects it as well. She seems to contradict herself, on the one hand crying “I'm a bloodsucking fiend: look at my outfit!” (leather pants and a low-cut black corset) while on the other hand embracing Vampire Willow's ability to defy rules imposed on her by her gender. In a remarkable moment of confusion, Willow, playing Vampire Willow, expresses her distaste towards her own accommodating personality. Rather than directing her resentment at the structures of her school and relationships which confine her to her role as Willow-the-good-girl, she says “[I] bothered me... [I'm] always letting people walk all over [me.]” This is the moment where Willow seems most genuine as Vampire Willow, expressing her contempt towards good girl Willow, a “fuzzy” “doormat”. Willow's play at being Vampire Willow allows her to express her own anger and identify the elements of her own personality and character that most bother her. As much as Vampire Willow's violent sexuality and provocative behaviour are condemned, Willow's desire to replicate them is not. Towards the end of the episode, Willow is ready to disclaim her own rebellion in order to distance herself from Vampire Willow: “I feel like staying at home... and dying a virgin. ... [Wishverse Willow] messed up everything she touched.” However, she changes her mind when Percy, who had been terrified by Vampire Willow, comes up and explains humbly that he's done exactly what she asked him to do. This scene rescues the episode from being a simple expression of societal fear of the assertive woman. Instead, the episode presents Willow with a warning about her own potential for violence, but encourages her to defy her own social conditioning. Although Vampire Willow remains unredeemed, by the end of the episode she is not so straightforwardly monstrous, either: Willow's ambivalence forces the audience to understand Vampire Willow, and her violation of gender roles, as more complex than simple evil.
“Doppelgangland”'s displays, and criticisms, of gendered roleplay do not end with Willow. Faith, the rogue Slayer, appears only briefly in this episode - unsurprisingly, since her volatility and violence are expressed very well in Wishverse Willow. Both sport fetishist leather outfits, both combine sex with violence, and both threaten and confound the Scooby Gang – Vampire Willow as a challenge to Willow's persona, and Faith as a challenge to Buffy, her own (slightly less literal) doppelganger. A heavy Faith presence in this episode would be overkill. However, in one brief scene, “Doppelgangland” offers the audience the chance to see a different side of Faith, as well as a different understanding of gender. In her scene with the Mayor, we see Faith drop her rebellious and violent persona to play the grateful daughter to the Mayor's heavy-handed “family man.” In his scenes, the Mayor, who is several hundred years old, and “built [Sunnydale] for the demons” (“Enemies”, Season 3 Episode 17), represents the patriarchy: the town is literally structured to benefit him and Sunnydale's resident demon population, and he is a traditionalist and spokesperson for “family values.” He behaves paternally towards Faith and, indeed, most of his minions (Chandler, 6-7). Faith plays up to this, gleefully bouncing on the bed as he tells her to take her shoes off; when she attempts to sexualise their relationship, calling him “sugar daddy,” he firmly reminds her that he is a family man, a caring father figure. However, despite his overt appearances, the Mayor is the most monstrous character of the episode, and indeed of the season. The audience's attention is drawn to his hypocrisy first by Faith's strange metamorphosis, and then as he cheerfully declares his intentions to have Willow murdered. The scene draws attention to the fact that, just as Faith's actions in this scene are a performance of gender, so are the Mayor's; his benevolent, patriarchal father act is as dangerous, even monstrous, as Vampire Willow's girlish performance. Patricia Pender argues that feminist camp “foregrounds the inevitably performative nature of gender role playing” (Pender: 39): in this way, Faith and the Mayor serve to highlight the artificiality of heteronormative roles.
There are parallels for Faith and the Mayor's dialogue in two other pairings: Willow and Snyder, and Anyanka and D'Hoffryn. Both Willow and Anya are submissive to a male figure: Anya must appeal to D'Hoffryn to retrieve her agency, the power she uses to avenge women wronged by men, while Snyder forces Willow to waste her time on Percy's homework. Ironically, the most outwardly monstrous of the three, D'Hoffryn the demon lord, is condemned the least. D'Hoffryn's rejection of Anya is frank and not grounded in any kind of gender play: indeed, it is almost entirely impersonal. Anya's powers were taken away from her by Buffy (“The Wish”); it is her responsibility, not his, to retrieve them. Meanwhile, Snyder takes frank advantage of both the school's power structure and Willow's accommodating nature to coerce her, and his scene is grounded in the language of the heteronormative discourse. Yet somehow, Snyder still comes out ahead of the Mayor by virtue of his sincerity. Snyder is open in his dislike of Percy and is frank about his manipulation of Willow. Although he requires her to perform certain activities, unlike the Mayor he does not perform any kind of gender roleplay, or require it of Willow; his gaze is firmly asexual and his intentions are unpleasant, but also open. The Mayor, visually the most appealing of the three (D'Hoffryn is a disfigured demon, while Snyder is short and his features are reminiscent of a goblin) is nevertheless the most monstrous in his interactions with Faith.
The masculine monstrous is depicted and opposed in one final way. The keystone concept of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (according to Joss Whedon, quoted in Chandler, paragraph 1) is contained (even satirised) in a short scene: a group of male vampires, sent after Willow, stumble instead on Vampire Willow, who proceeds first to incapacitate them and then torture them into subservience. Susan Owen describes scenes like this – usually featuring Buffy as the blonde victim-turned-avenger – as a “gleeful[...] transpos[ition]” (Owen: 25). As the male vampires stride down the alley towards the apparently defenceless Willow, though, they represent the ultimate in the monstrous masculine, the rapist and violent attacker. Their vampiric masks demonstrate a kind of arousal (Owen: 28), their fangs ready to penetrate and kill the ultimate victim, the woman alone.
“Doppelgangland” plays with and performs images and understandings of gender and gendered roles in order to first produce, and then compromise, notions of the monstrous feminine. Willow's doppelganger, Vampire Willow from the Wishverse, represents societal fears of the “nasty girl” as well as being a fundamentally abject, and therefore horrific, creature. Yet Willow's ambivalence towards Vampire Willow asks the audience to question her monstrosity, and wonder whether the forces of traditional heteronormative gender roles are equally monstrous as they confine Willow. The theme of challenging patriarchal pressures is elaborated on as the Mayor reveals himself to be both the bastion of traditionalism and the enabler of the monstrous, and the monstrous masculine is explored (albeit briefly)in the violence of the male vampire. “Doppelgangland”'s vivid villain, Wishverse Willow, is a memorable expression of the monstrous-feminine, the receptacle of psychological and sociological fear of the powerful woman; yet a deeper analysis of the text reveals that Vampire Willow's monstrous-feminine is challenged and questioned, even as the monstrous-masculine is less overtly, but also less ambivalently, condemned.
1 Ironically, even as Willow complains that Snyder “thinks everybody's time is his,” she is happy to obey Giles' peremptory instructions to “get on the computer.” Perhaps this is because Giles is a “decidedly feminized male” (Owen: 24) and she fails to recognise him as part of the male-dominated structure she is opposing. More likely, though, Willow simply likes Giles better, and is more willing to devote her time to something that emphasises and challenges her special talents – computer programming, rather than tutoring.
2 Vampire Willow is a woman, and her gaze would normally be considered a female gaze; Karras' article details the ways in which granting a woman, Buffy, her own gaze in an horror show creates her as a revolutionary female character (paras. 11-12). Buffy's ability to “look back” (ibid) enables her to defeat the generally masculinised vampires. However, the positioning of Vampire Willow in this scene, and Willow's role, means that Vampire Willow can be seen as adopting the male gaze, at least temporarily.
Works Cited
Barron, Christie and Dany Lacombe. “Moral Panic and the Nasty Girl.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. 42(1): 51-70.
Battis, Jes. “She's Not All Grown Yet: Willow as Hybrid/Hero in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 8 (Vol. 2, Issue 4.)
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage8/Battis.htm
Call, Lewis. “'Sounds Like Kinky Business to Me': Subtextual and Textual Representations of Erotic Power in the Buffyverse.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 24 (Vol. 6, Issue 4.)
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage24/Call.htm
Chandler, Holly. “Slaying the Patriarchy: Transfusions of the Vampire Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 9 (Vol. 3, Issue 1.)
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage9/Chandler.htm
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection.” In B.K. Grant (ed.): The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (pp. 35-65). Austin: University of Texas Press.
“Doppelgangland.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 23 February, 1999
“Enemies.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 16 March, 1999.
“Fool for Love.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 14 November, 2000.
Karras, Irene. “The Third Wave's Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Thirdspace. Vol. 1 Issue 2.
http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/karras.htm
Kociemba, David. “'Where's the fun?': Comic Apocalypse in 'The Wish.'” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 23 (Vol. 6, Issue 3.)
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage23/Kociemba.htm
Owen, A. Susan. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Vampires, postmodernity and postfeminism.” Journal of Popular Film & Television, 27(2): 24-31.
Levy, Sophie. “'You still my girl?': Adolescent femininity as resistance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Reconstruction. 3(1).
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/031/levy.htm
Pender, Patricia. “'I'm Buffy and You're... History': The postmodern politics of Buffy.” In R. Wilcox & D. Lavery (eds.), Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (pp 35-44). NY: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ruddell, Caroline. “'I am the Law' 'I am the Magics': Speech, Power, and the Split Identity of Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. Issue 20 (Vol. 5, Issue 4).
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage20/Ruddell.htm
“The Harvest.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 10 March, 1997.
“The Wish.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States: The WB. 8 December, 1998.
Note: web-based articles are cited by paragraph, rather than page.
*whew* I started this days ago and I've still got to pick up an extra reference to have it finished by five tonight. SIGH. If anyone could point out any little incoherencies, I'd be most grateful. I finished this at 11:30 last night, but I didn't feel really lucid till 11 - I tried to be good and do it ahead of time, how come I can only write carefully past 11?
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Date: 2008-04-01 02:07 am (UTC)argh am at 2,110, and it's 3:04. and i've been in the loft for a good 2 1/2 hours. and a good 400 words of that is the episode synopsis. XD i might have to cut down the series synopsis, i feel like i've rambled too much.
and i've still got a good 2 paragraphs to go, plus conclusion! i really want to sit back and rereread through everything i've written, but i so don't have time.
will have to wait til i've finished mine til i read yours, but it looks great from what i've skimmed! (and you've got paragraphs shorter than a page. i need to work on that...)
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Date: 2008-04-01 03:13 am (UTC)OMG. D: D: D: Hurry!!!!! *unhelpful*