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© Laurel Bowman, 2002
Department of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria
Buffy has always been written as a "female hero"; the fundamental question underlying the series and the movie which began has been, "what does it mean to be a woman and a hero?" The series has laboured mightily not to simply transpose masculine characteristics onto a woman, (unlike, for example, "Xena, Warrior Princess"). Rather, BtVS has tried not only to maintain the female characteristics of its heroine, but to rewrite the "hero's journey" in female terms. The study of how it has succeeded or failed in this aim is fascinating, and I want here to consider only one aspect of this question: a part of the story in which, I would say, the creators failed in their aim. I am referring to the death of Joyce Summers in Season 5.
Joyce Summers, Buffy's mother, was ill for most of Season 5, appeared to recover, and then died unexpectedly and abruptly, throwing the hero unwilling and unprepared into the role of breadwinner and guardian of her younger sister Dawn. Dawn herself was an unexpected and abrupt addition to the world of Buffy, appearing at the beginning of Season 5 as a young adolescent whom everyone (except the audience) remembers as always having been there. Eventually we learn that she is a mystical interdimensional "Key" who has been given human form by monks so powerful they are capable of warping the memories of everyone who might have met her. The function of this addition to the cast, performed at the expense not only of enormous mystical monkish energy but also of considerable strain to even the notoriously willing Buffyverse audience's suspension of disbelief, must surely have seemed extremely important to the series creator. However, on seeing what has been made of the addition of Dawn to the cast in the ensuing two years, I believe that she was introduced in the belief that Freudian Oedipal theory necessarily applied to the psyche of a female hero; and that this belief was wrong.
Dawn's narrative function, as it was revealed in Season 5, was as the "key" that could open the doors between all the dimensions, to allow an exiled Hell- god, "Glory", to return to her domain, incidentally destroying the earth in the process. But she had an important structural function as well. The monks made Dawn Buffy's little sister, we are explicitly told (by a dying monk), in order to make Buffy willing to protect Dawn with her life, if it came to that, as indeed it did; Buffy sacrificed her life at the end of Season 5, for Dawn's sake.
Dawn performs a useful function both in the narrative, as the key, and structurally, as the one for whom Buffy will sacrifice her life. It was necessary for Buffy to die at her stage of the Hero's Journey at the end of Season 5, and it was a feminist rewrite of that hero's journey - as indeed is much of Buffy's story - to make her die neither for father nor for lover, but for a female sibling.
Dawn's function is further revealed in the episode "Normal Again", in Season 6, where Buffy goes mad and hallucinates (probably) that she's a schizophrenic in a psychiatric ward who has fantasized her life in Sunnydale. In this world, Joyce is still alive, her parents are still together, and they are ready to take care of her for as long as it takes her to get well. From being responsible for the welfare of the entire world, in her life as the Slayer, Buffy in the world of the psychiatric ward is responsible for nothing at all, not even herself, and can rely on others to supply her every need. The continued existence of Buffy's mother, in the world of the hallucination, is a metaphor for Buffy's relinquishing of the adult duties that have been forced on her unwilling in Sunnydale. Buffy's mother exists to take care of her, is the message; but Buffy the Hero needs to accept that no one can do that for her - as, again, she does, by the end of the episode.
Dawn doesn't exist in the world of the hallucination, and the doctor on the ward explains her function in Sunnydale in terms which make perfectly clear the dramatic reasons she was introduced into the story at the beginning of season 5. Buffy invented her, he says, because she was beginning to lose her reasons to remain in the "Sunnydale" fantasy as it became more difficult to sustain; and so she created a family figure, Dawn, to give her an additional bond to her Sunnydale world.
We've now been told both by a dying monk and a hallucinated doctor that Dawn' function in Buffy's world is as a family tie, a bond to the world of Sunnydale of sufficient importance to her that she will defend it and remain interested in that world. We have not been told, but can surmise, from this description, that Dawn was introduced to the story at the beginning of Season 5 because the creators intended to remove Buffy's other family bond, by killing Joyce Summers. Dawn was necessary because Joyce was going to die.
Why, then, would Dawn be preferable to Joyce as a family member? Because, Normal Again informs us, Joyce's job was to take care of Buffy; but Buffy's job is to take care of Dawn. The death of Joyce turns Buffy from a daughter into an adult; the introduction of Dawn turns her into a responsible adult and parental substitute, invested in the care of a dependent younger sibling. Joyce was killed and Dawn introduced to the story to turn Buffy from a dependent to an adult with dependents of her own.
All of this makes dramatic sense, but it has introduced unnecessary problems into the story, which could have been tackled another way. There is, for one thing, the huge expenditure of audience sympathy (and mystical energy) necessary to insert Dawn into the story. There is, for another, the plunging of Buffy into the world of adulthood - mortgages, plumbing, electrical bills, social workers, parenthood, holding a job - at an age (not yet 21) when no one in North America would reasonably expect her to undertake such responsibilities; and, predictably, she sinks under the load. All of this could have been avoided if Joyce Summers had been allowed to live. Why wasn't she?
I think Joyce Summers was killed because of a (not necessarily conscious) misapplication of Oedipal theory to the world of Buffy. To recap very briefly, according to Freud, baby boys initially identify with the most powerful person in their world - their mother. Once they realize that they themselves are male, they must let go of the identification with the mother, which they do in favour of a desire to have sole control of her, by marrying her and killing their father, who is an undesired interloper in this relationship. Their necessary task in achieving individuation and eventual adulthood is to relinquish that desire as well, identify, instead, with their same- sex parent, the father, and in return for relinquishing their desire to be united with their mother, they receive the right to marry any mother- substitute - that is, any other woman - they choose.
Freud discusses this in terms of the desire for the "phallus", which Freud identifies with the penis, but which it's more reasonable to identify simply as "subjectivity" - that is, the ability to function in society under one's own control. It is not going too far to identify the "phallus" simply with "power to act". In Freud's terms, infant boys initially identify the mother as the source of the "phallus", which, naturally, they want. When they realize that in fact the mother does not have the "phallus", they recoil from her not only in disgust but in fear, because if she doesn't have the phallus, it is possible for them to lose (or not to acquire) the phallus themselves. They then - correctly, to Freud - identify the father as the phallus- owner, and moreover, the phallus- bestower and the phallus taker- away. If they do not relinquish their desire for their mother, they fear that their powerful fathers may deny them their own phallus (in Freud's terms, this is "castration anxiety"). Eventually they realize that if they relinquish their desire to own their own mothers, who are already in their father's keeping, their fathers will allow them secure possession of a phallus of their own, with which they can attract a maternal substitute.
They relinquish, then, their desire to marry their mothers. Their desire to kill their fathers, however, seems to remain. Possession of the phallus, that is, of full adult power, usually symbolized by "kingship", is over and over again Western myth achieved only by the passage of phallus from father to son on the father's death. This passage of the phallus by inheritance is made nakedly clear in the line of succession in Greek creation myth, where Ouranos succeeds to his father Chronos' throne by overcoming and castrating him. (Almost exactly parallel stories are found in Babylonian and Hittite creation myths as well; see Jaan Puhvel, Comparative Mythology, Johns Hopkins 1987). It is obviously the case in the Oedipus myth, where Oedipus becomes king after killing Laius; and it's also true of Perseus, who accidentally kills his grandfather; Theseus, who kills his father through negligence; and is interestingly untrue of Jason, who fails to get rid of his evil father- substitute (his wicked uncle Pelias) and so never becomes king anywhere - in fact, never really "grows up". The road to adulthood, in Western myth and in Freud, for a male "hero", is over the body of his dead father.
And this is certainly what has happened in the Buffyverse. Buffy has been forced into adulthood abruptly and at an early age, by the death of her mother. But was this necessary? Let's return to Freud.
Freud initially thought that little girls formed a primary attachment to their fathers but then, eventually, learned to identify with their mothers, in a progression parallel to but opposite to the developmental curve of little boys. But he eventually realized that he was wrong. Both girls and boys initially identify with their mothers, the most powerful person in the infant universe, and identify them as owners and possible bestowers of the "phallus". Both girls and boys eventually learn that their mothers are not holders of the "phallus", and then turn to their fathers as holders and possible bestowers of the phallus in order to get one of their own. But boys, in return for relinquishing their desire to own their mothers, are promised that they will eventually have the phallus and be able to attract a mother substitute. Girls, on the other hand, have to perform two difficult psychic tasks; first, to realize that their mothers do not have the phallus; and next, to realize that they themselves can never have the phallus, under any circumstances; that their father holds the phallus, true, but will never bestow it on them. In physical terms, according to Freud, they accept their castration; realize that they'll never have a penis. In psychological terms, they realize that they will never hold full adult authority; will never have the power to act as a full member of adult society. Acceptance of this fact produces as well- adjusted woman; except, of course, that accepting that you will never be an adult is itself a maladjustment, which results in Freud's identification of the 'healthy' woman as somehow 'masochistic'.
It is this identification of the healthy woman as masochistic which has cast Freud into disrepute among feminists. But if we think of this not as prescriptive - as what Freud thought women SHOULD be - but rather as descriptive - as Freud's observation of the effect living in Viennese society in the 19th century had on the typical woman - it is probably pretty accurate.
Obviously Freud's theory about healthy women, that their adjustment depends on the acceptance that they are not and never will be possessors of the phallus - doesn't apply to Buffy. She is a phallus- possessor; she's the hero, and has not only the opportunity but the responsibility to act as a full adult in her society - and to save the world besides. In the world of the Buffyverse, Buffy may in fact be the ONLY phallus- possessor (or, at the very least, owner of the biggest one).
But did Joyce need to die for Buffy to get her phallus - her adulthood, her 'kingship" in the world of Sunnydale? If a male hero's father has to die for the hero to become a 'king', and adult, is it therefore necessary for a female hero's mother to die to achieve the same effect?
Probably not; because the road to adulthood - the hero's journey, to put it another way - for men and women is not in fact parallel. Boys, in order to achieve full psycho- sexual integration, must separate themselves from their mothers, cease to identify with them. Realise that they're different from their mothers, and more like their fathers, to put it simply. The rejection of the mother which boys must perform in order to acquire the phallus is necessary simply for them to realize that they are not women themselves. But Freud's parallel assumptions about women's psychic journey, that they also had to reject their mothers, and then perform the even more tortuous second step of realizing that they could never have the father's phallus anyway, however well they may have explained his observations of Viennese society of his day, are unnecessary to describe the journey of women towards adulthood in our own.
Girls, in order to achieve adult status as women, do not in fact have to perform the Freudian step of rejecting the mother. If the "phallus" is identified as the ability to act as an adult in society, it is not explicitly attached to males. Girls can achieve the powers of adulthood by identifying themselves with their mothers, as women, and growing up in their company. In Freudian terms, the phallus is a unitary object, which can only be acquired by gift - or theft - from its original possessor, who doesn't necessarily lose it himself, but in fact (in myth) usually does, by death of castration. But the phallus, if it is seen as power to act, is not necessarily inherited; it can be grown into and earned. Mothers and daughters can both possess it; can both, in other words, be adults, and have the power to act as subjects in the world.
In myths about male heroes, the hero does not become an adult until his father dies. It wasn't unreasonable for the creators of the Buffyverse to assume that the same would hold true for female heroes, and to force Buffy into adulthood by killing her mother. Dramatically, this solution to the problem of the hero's achievement of adulthood worked well enough. But it worked with considerable violence to the story, in the injection of Dawn into the script and the problems Buffy has faced in Season 6. This violence was unnecessary. Buffy is a female hero, and so could have reached full power and responsibility, as an adult in her world, even if her mother were alive.
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