As critics have shown, fairy tales are politically and morally conservative and often reinforce patriarchal and class hierarchies. Though several episodes of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer include fairy tale elements, these elements are subverted and distorted, creating an empowering, pro-feminist discourse that is in sharp contrast with the conservative messages of most fairy tales. While fairy tales punish willful women, Buffy re-interprets these texts to promote female empowerment and emphasize the dangers of patriarchal oppression.
This is most apparent in three episodes: “Ted,” “Gingerbread,” and “Hush.” “Ted” is a retelling of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” with a cybernetic twist. In this episode, the female utopia of Buffy’s single-mother household is invaded by Joyce’s new beau, Ted, a model of 1950s patriarchy and wife-killing cyborg. As an evil (potential) step-father, Ted’s attempts to subjugate Buffy are unsuccessful, and she eventually defeats him with a frying pan, a symbol of female domesticity. Similarly, “Gingerbread” seems like a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel” and features a witch-hunt in the wake of the discovery of two dead children. However, the children are revealed to be demons who incite hysteria and violence, and the episode stresses the dangers of characterizing powerful women as witches. Finally, “Hush” introduces the Gentlemen, monsters who steal voices from a town before collecting seven human hearts. Always polite and well dressed, the Gentlemen epitomize sophisticated patriarchal codes of conduct. The episode emphasizes the power of female speech, as Buffy’s screams kill the Gentlemen.
Thus, the show dismantles the patriarchal messages of fairy tales, instead showcasing the horrors of male control and criticizing the vilification of witches. Rather than a noble prince, it offers an empowered, willful, and witty heroine who refuses to submit to male authority.
About the presenterKerry Lynn Boyles
Kerry Boyles teaches writing and composition courses at Rutgers-Camden University and The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In 2014, she received an M.A. in English literature from Rutgers, where she studied Victorian and Gothic texts. She completed a thesis titled “ ‘Eating Death’: Hunger, Power, and the Female Vampire of the Fin de Siecle,” which discussed the iconography of angelic female anorexia in nineteenth-century literature and art and its connection with the demonizing of unrestrained female appetites in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, George MacDonald’s Lilith, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.