I know what you're thinking regardless of where you sit. "Blue, why do you keep writing about Edgar Allan Poe?" And it's a fair question. I have an answer. In eye-guzzling an enormous amount of film and television over the years, I have been able to spot Poe influence more easily than any other. So sit back, relax, and I promise you another writer soon and very soon.
It is the aim of Gothic literature, within the canon and outside of it, to hold up a magnifying glass to idealism and see it for what it is—freakish. While Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most canonically influential Gothic writers in history, it is possible that Joss Whedon is the one of the most influential Gothic screenwriters in the past two decades. Most famously, Whedon was the creator and showrunner of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” a cult classic television series that ran on the WB and UPN from 1997 to 2003.
The title alone implies that “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” includes (and subverts, but that is for another time) a number of Gothic literary elements, and Poe’s inspiration is quite apparent throughout the series. It is especially prevalent near the conclusion of “Buffy’s” sixth season, in which the character of Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) defies her typically good nature and attempts to destroy the world in order to avenge the wrongful death of her beloved. In this end-of-season arc, Willow’s motivations and actions most closely resemble those of the narrator in Poe’s 1843 short story, “The Tell Tale Heart.”
Firstly, in order to understand what Willow has in common with Poe’s narrator, it is important to summarize “The Tell Tale Heart.” In the story, an unnamed narrator decides to kill his elderly, mild-mannered neighbor for no solid reason other than perhaps one of his eyes. According to the narrator, this eye was that “of a vulture… pale blue with a film over it.” Eventually, the narrator succeeds in his homicide, but then the police arrive at the old man’s house. Despite the fact that the narrator severed the old man’s body into pieces and hid them under the floorboards, he is certain he can hear the beating of the man’s heart beneath the wood. The police hear nothing, but the narrator becomes so overwhelmed with the sound that he rips up the floor, reveals the hacked bits of the body, and he confesses to the crime.
The auditory hallucination of the beating heart is almost universally interpreted as the narrator’s guilt, which is potentially Poe’s greatest tool in the characterization of a murderer. Instead of writing his murderer characters as pure evil and absent of remorse, he has a way of developing the killer as someone (for lack of a better term) relatable. More often than not, readers do not take pride in watching a Poe murderer be discovered by the authorities. They root for him. They beg the police to give this killer redemption when it is made abundantly clear to the readers that the murder truly did occur.
It is simple to interpret “The Tell Tale Heart” as a written confession to the homicide, and yet, readers still find the ability to take pity on this narrator. This is all in Poe’s characterization. Because the narrator obsessively mentions that he can hear the beating of the dead man’s heart, which eventually drives him so mad that he decides silence is better than life in prison, readers like to think that this is his way of showing remorse. If he were purely evil, he would have taken pride in his clever cover-up and gone on with his life as though the events of this night never took place. But since he was haunted by the old man and his own horrific deeds, he is not purely evil, and readers should sympathize with and perhaps even support him.
And maybe this is true. Maybe because this narrator makes a confession and compulsively thinks about the crime he committed, he is not pure evil. After all, St. Augustine argues that evil is nothingness and only exists because it is dependent on goodness and morality. This only strengthens the case that Poe wants his readers to sympathize with his murderer characters. If the reader considers Augustine’s definition of evil and interprets the narrator’s hallucination in “The Tell Tale Heart” as guilt, it seems as though Poe’s murderers are not the social exception. They are the norm. On “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Joss Whedon and his contributing writers developed the character of Willow Rosenberg quite similarly to the manner in which Poe created the murderer in “The Tell Tale Heart.”
Even though Whedon and Co. had about seven years to completely develop Willow as a character while Poe was only given a few short pages, the writers on “Buffy” still managed to create Willow as, initially, an extremely sympathetic and realistic human character. In fact, it is hard to find many flaws at all in the earliest incarnation of Willow Rosenberg.
The first season of the series was just twelve episodes long, but Willow (protagonist Buffy’s new best friend) is probably one of the most likable characters introduced to the audience. She is kind, loyal to Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), pining for the affection of Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), and because she is one of the most intelligent students at Sunnydale High School, she is often teased for being a “nerd.” It is difficult not to root for Willow. She has an abundance of wonderful traits that many would be fortunate to possess, and yet, she is at the bottom of the secondary-school hierarchy. Gradually, however, Willow transforms from a sweetly meek sidekick to a hero in her own right, which increasingly amplifies her flaws. However, since the audience was introduced to Willow as a character with minimal moral problems, it is difficult not to support the character even in the grizzliest of situations.
About halfway through “Buffy’s” second season, Willow takes an interest in Wicca and is rather talented with magic. However, at this point, she is still a novice, which poses an issue when she wishes to conquer problems that might be too grand for her. Most notably, at the end of the second season, Willow wants to perform a spell that will restore the soul of Buffy’s vampire boyfriend, Angel (David Boreanaz). Though she is warned that this is a complicated spell that could pose danger to her and the rest of the world, Willow does not seem to care. She performs the spell from a hospital bed and is ultimately successful. There are two ways in which to examine Willow’s choice in this episode, and here, I will present both.
The first is likely the more popular way. The audience wants to believe that Willow is such a loyal friend to Buffy that she would risk anything for the possibility that she could get Angel back. After all, there have been a myriad of examples of Willow loving Buffy and sacrificing her own safety to assist her in saving the town of Sunnydale and the universe. However, there is a second lens through which to view Willow’s choice, and that is that her the thought that her thirst to prove her skills is so great that she would risk the destruction of the world so that she might solidify herself as a budding witch. It is a less popular interpretation, but because of Willow’s character development as the series progresses, it is a plausible one. This interpretation and all of its forthcoming support also assists in closely linking Willow to the narrator of “The Tell Tale Heart,” a concept I will explore at length in one week’s time.
