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Chapter I:
William the Bloody Angelus was intended to be the big bad for season 2 of BtVS. But that particular shock was to be reserved for the last quarter of the season. It must have seemed to the writers, therefore, that with the disposal of the Master at the end of season 1 there was a need to have an interim antagonist who could preoccupy Buffy’s attention and set the scene for the re-appearance of Angel’s own demon. That was where Spike came in. He first arrived in the episode “School Hard” and the title of the episode is itself an interesting one. It is, of course, an inversion of the term “hard school” meaning a place where you learn through great effort, endurance and difficulty. Buffy’s life is of course difficult at the best of times so the suggestion is that Spike is a tougher proposition than even the Master. And indeed again and again we see emphasized throughout the episode how much of a threat he would be:
And his very image seemed intended to reinforce this picture. The Master had been a quasi-religious figure. In contrast Spike is an anti-authority figure who respects nothing and no-one, owns no better:
Yet, at the same time we also see a very different side to Spike – a genuine affection for, perhaps even love of Drusilla. The pair of them arrive in Sunnydale shortly after Drusilla is seriously weakened by an angry mob in Prague. Spike initially hopes that the Hellmouth's energy can help restore her strength but when these hopes are disappointed he remains a devoted caretaker for her in her weakened condition, always solicitous and even tender. The way in which these two seemingly conflicting traits - the rebellious killer and the lover - are married in Spike is the key to his characterization and to help us understand this we must look at the way in which Spike’s story in developed over a series of flashbacks both in BtVS and ANGEL. The first flashback occurs in BtVS Season Five's "Fool for Love", and reveals that William, before he was turned, was in fact a struggling poet who lived in London, England in 1880. The time and place seem to me to be significant. The dominant cultural force at the time was the Romantic Movement. Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment (especially its prevailing rationalism with its scientific rationalization of nature) and partly a reaction to the increasing urbanization and industrialization of the world. The movement elevated emotion and feeling above rational analysis. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism. The movement preferred folk custom and medievalism (hence its taste for Gothic) above the classicism which lay at the heart of the Enlightenment. And it also embraced the exotic, unfamiliar and distant (for example in the fashion for Chinoiserie). In doing so it sought to harness the power of the imagination to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl and industrialism. In literature, in particular, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation of the past, the cult of "sensibility", the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature free from societal norms and constraints.
Chapter II:
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know And it is against this background that we get the phenomenon of the Romantic Hero. The Romantic hero is a literary archetype referring to a character that is defined by his individuality and sense of self. He is someone who rejects established norms and conventions and in turn has been rejected by society and, therefore, has the self not others as the center of his or her own existence. As one critic out it, the Romantic hero is often "placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting". Perhaps the most influential development of the Romantic hero – the Byronic hero - was created by Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, in the early nineteenth century. A Byronic hero exhibits several characteristic traits, and in many ways he can be considered a rebel. The Byronic hero does not possess "heroic virtue" in the usual sense; instead, he has many dark qualities. Often he is characterized by a guilty memory of some unnamed, often sexual, crime. At the same time the Byronic hero is moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue. He also has emotional and intellectual capacities, which are superior to the average man. These heightened abilities force the Byronic hero to be arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive, and extremely conscious of himself. In this sense the Byronic hero is "larger than life". He is usually isolated from society as a wanderer or is in exile of some kind. It does not matter whether this social separation is imposed upon him by some external force or is self-imposed. Because of this inner darkness, these “larger than life” qualities and his sense of isolation, in one form or another, the Byronic hero rejects the values and moral codes of society and because of this he is often a figure of repulsion, as well as fascination. In Byron's poem, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" the main character is portrayed as a dark, brooding man who doesn't like his family background or indeed society generally and wants to escape from the world because of his discontent with it. In the third stanza of the poem we learn that Childe Harold is the product of a long line of nobility:
But he is bothered by his family ties.
This line shows that Childe Harold is upset with the reputation that he has inherited from his family. We are told of Childe Harold's dark and secret past in stanza eight:
although the nature of his past is never directly stated. In the fourth stanza we are also told that Childe Harold is unhappy with the society around him.
He feels so isolated that he compares his life to that of a hermit's. So, he strives to break this mold of his past and become someone who isn't associated with the likes of his ancestors as well as to separate himself from society. In Childe Harold's case he does this by running away from his father's castle and exploring nature to seek something better there in its wildness and purity.
Stanza ten reads
This proves that Childe Harold did not have many friends, and if he did their friendship was not highly valued. There is however a woman in his life.
This woman, as explained in the passage, is the only woman that Childe Harold will think about. Although he has had the chance for many others, one woman will always win his affection. The one problem with this love is that the woman for whom he strives can never be his. There are many parallels between Harold and Spike. The first thing to note was that Spike as a human was a gentleman. We can see this both from the fact that he has the leisure time to pursue his interest in poetry and from the circles in which he moved. Secondly he was a poet, an artist, albeit not a very good one. Thirdly – largely though his dogged though fruitless pursuit of an aristocratic woman called Cecily - we see how central to his existence was the idea of romantic love. William’s ordinary conversation was extravagant enough: “Oh, quickly! I'm the very spirit of vexation. What's another word for "gleaming"? It's a perfectly perfect word as many words go but the bother is nothing rhymes, you see.” But when he tries to capture what Cecily means to him his language takes flight: "My heart expands 'tis grown a bulge in it inspired by your beauty, effulgent." Interestingly this isn’t a description of a real woman or the feelings of an ordinary man for a woman. But then William isn’t someone who loves a woman in the conventional sense. He is someone in love with the idea of being in love. Indeed the giveaway here was that he was completely unconscious about what Cecily really thought of him. Not only did he not notice her discomfort; he couldn’t conceive that any woman would find his ostentatious protestations embarrassing. Somehow you get the feeling that for all his fine feelings it’s far more about William than it is about Cecily. In other words his passion is not only larger than life but essentially self-centered. In other words it is his feelings, his desires that are the center of his own existence. Nevertheless he is a man of intellect who is dominated by a grand passion. Spike, as a vampire, embodies basically the same qualities. Beneath his working class dress and accent, Spike remains someone of superior insight. Throughout BtVS he is portrayed as the character who can see though the superficialites of a case and get to its heart, as when in "the Gift" he explains the (somewhat dubious) metaphysics behind Dawn:
But in contrast to the single-minded viciousness of the reputation he brought with him to Sunnydale, Spike in this human form was weak and ineffectual. He is even patronized by servants and for class conscious Victorian society there could be no greater humiliation. He was mollycoddled by his mother who would often sing the folksong "Early One Morning" to her son when he was a baby, right up until the time he was turned into a vampire. He is mocked ruthlessly by his peers. Even his nickname was given a different spin. Whereas in season 2 of BtVS "William the Bloody" was a symbol of his fearsomeness, in “Fool for Love” it was representative of the way he was mocked by his peers because his poetry was so "bloody awful." He was therefore rejected by the very society he wished to be a part of. But worst of all he is roundly rejected by Cecily herself: Cecily: “Your poetry, it's... they're... not written about me, are they?” William: “They're about how I feel.” Cecily: “Yes, but are they about me?” William: “Every syllable.” Cecily: “Oh, God!” William: “Oh, I know... it's sudden and... please, if they're no good, they're only words but... the feeling behind them... I love you, Cecily.” Cecily: “Please stop!” William: “I know I'm a bad poet but I'm a good man and all I ask is that... that you try to see me…”. Cecily: “I do see you. That's the problem. You're nothing to me, William. You're beneath me.” The reaction of the others, William could afford to ignore. He could tell himself that they do not understand what he is trying to say. But it was Cecily to whom he had opened his heart and her words bore the sting of rejection – final and absolute. It was a rejection not do much of his poetry but of everything he felt and thought and tried to say through his poetry. That was what hurt because that was the real William. Rejection of those things was rejection of him. Drusilla saw this. When she follows him he points to his heart and head in succession and says: “Your wealth lies here... and here. In the spirit and... imagination. You walk in worlds the others can't begin to imagine.” As a human his feelings and the “spirit and imagination” they engendered in him were the things he valued most but he was shamed and humiliated because of them. He was in short a loser. By recognizing this and by turning him into a vampire who could defy society’s rules and live life as he defined it, Drusilla gave him the recognition he had vainly sought in human society. And once made he could ignore that society’s values and its opinion of him: “Becoming a vampire is a profound and powerful experience. I could feel this new strength coursing through me. Getting killed made me feel alive for the very first time. I was through living by society's rules. Decided to make a few of my own.” Drusilla therefore became his “destiny” as he said in the season 5 Angel episode of that name. But the very same night he uses this word to refer to Drusilla he finds that Angelus has taken her for himself simply because he could. Perhaps more to the point it was to demonstrate to William that he could do what he wanted. William’s claim to a special interest in Drusilla was something Angelus could not tolerate. He had to show his pupil who was boss. In the face of William’s enraged sense of betrayal he explains the facts of vampire life: “Well, you're new... and a little dim. So let me explain to you how things are now. There's no belonging or deserving anymore. You can take what you want, have what you want... but nothing is yours.” In the end he arrogantly offers William the chance to win Drusilla back from him, in effect throwing down a challenge to fight him for her. And we may also assume that this was a fight that William lost. For Angelus there is no destiny, nothing that was meant to be and certainly nothing that belongs to anyone else. An ambassador and his wife coming to London to take up a position, a young couple about to be married or William besotted with Drusilla - they all came alike to him. They had no future they could count on, no destiny. If he wanted something from them, something that they thought was their own – even their lives - he could take it from them and there was nothing they could do about it. The lesson for Spike was a bitter one but it was evidently very well learned. William had no control over his unlife. His destiny had been something he found in others, Angelus his mentor and above all Drusilla, his great passion. But he became someone for whom the touchstone was strength and power because that gave him the self-respect and sense of control over his own life he craved. The point is best illustrated by the dripping contempt with which he surveys Angel helping a girl at the beginning of "In the Dark":
Here helping others is equated with weakness. And throughout “Destiny”, for example, we see how different Spike’s attitude had become compared to William’s. As soon as he becomes corporeal and realizes he can taste blood again he grabs Angel’s cup from his hand – without so much as a by-your-leave – and drinks deeply from it (thus nicely foreshadowing the way he will take the Cup of Perpetual Torment from him). His next move is to seize Harmony. In the face of Angel’s refusal of permission he simply says: “I wasn't asking.” and even throws someone out of his office. When he wants something he will go for it and won’t let anything stand in his way. This was a Spike was not going to appear respectable only to kill in secret. He now felt the power of being a vampire: “Come on. When was the last time you unleashed it? All out fight in a mob, back against the wall, nothing but fists and fangs? Don't you ever get tired of fights you know you're going to win.” This was a Spike who wanted to show the world that he was now someone to be reckoned with. And the way of course to show your power, to show you owned no master is to refuse to recognize constraints and limitations. This was, I think the key to Spike's impulsiveness:
Delaying gratification is an admission of limitation and constraints. By embracing an impulsive violence, he rejected not only the moral conventions of his times but more than that the power of society to control him. Moreoever, by adopting a working class English accent and latterly the dress of a rebel, Spike also rejected the social customs and sensibilities of the age into which he was born. Both shunned by and shunning society he terrorized Europe and Asia for years, first in concert with Angelus and Darla and then with just Drusilla to whom, as we have seen, he was devoted. Undoubtedly here we can see elements of the Byronic hero present in Spike, especially his arrogance and self-confidence as well as his “individualism” that is to say his refusal to identify himself with a group or an organization; his disregard of the common beliefs or values within society and chooses to act or think in his own way and the use of his own thoughts and ideas. He -
But until season 5 of BtVS there was one difference which overwhelmed everything else. Spike was still a soulless killer who revelled in violence and destruction. Even his name was symbolic of this. One of his acquaintances had insulted his poetry by saying: "I'd rather have a railroad spike through my head than listen to that awful stuff" So, as we have seen, Spike developed the habit of torturing people with railroad spikes. Now, a Byronic hero may defy conventional morality, his own moral sense may be deeply flawed and he may have a dark side but he is certainly not without a moral sense. Childe Harold is himself a good example of this. His whole decision to reject society and his own family and to seek something better in nature is itself a moral judgment. So, while the emphasis on Spike as a brutal, violent, soulless killer remains he cannot really be regarded as a Byronic hero.
Fool for Love But in season 5 of BtVS we see changes to the character of Spike that do seem deliberately intended to fit him into this mold. And the central catalyst for this new identity was Spike’s relationship with Buffy. And here we have to start with “Fool For Love”. For the most part this was a wonderful exploration of why Spike came to be the character who killed two slayers and became obsessed with a third. When Spike hears about slayers from Angelus in that episode he wasn’t interested in them as such. As he said himself: “I mean, to most vampires, the Slayer was the subject of cold sweat and frightened whispers. But I never hid. Hell, I sought her out. I mean, if you're looking for fun, there's death, there's glory and sod all else, right? I was young.” Instead of a romantic love for an unobtainable woman he became obsessed with the girl who, in each generation, was the mortal foe of Vampires. He wanted the slayer just like he wanted Cecily. But this time he did not admire her “effulgent” beauty. This time it was her power that he admired: “The first was all business but the second, she had a touch of your style. She was cunning, resourceful... oh, did I mention? Hot. I could have danced all night with that one.” And it wasn’t to live with the slayer as husband and wife that he wanted. It was to kill her. Only he didn’t put it quite like that. Spike was still a romantic at heart. Only as a vampire his concept of romance was very different. And let’s face it there is nothing quite so romantic as death. As a man he had been rejected by a woman. Now he has the strength and power of a Vampire, he could “dance” with the slayer and possess her. Never again would he be humiliated. But this story of how a hopeless ineffectual with an obsession with romantic love became someone who was determined to prove his worth and his power of strong women was transformed into something totally different in the last scene where he comforts Buffy. The first clue that something was going to change comes when we see Drusilla in effect abandon Spike in South America: Spike: “I haven't said a word about the bloody Slayer since we left California. She's on the other side of the planet, Dru!” Drusilla: “But you're lying! I can still see her floating all around you, laughing. Why? Why won't you push her away?” Drusilla had been established as Spike’s great love, the center of his concern and affection, his very destiny. Now she is being pushed out of his life by memories of the slayer. If all Spike was concerned about was proving himself stronger than the slayer then why would Drusilla feel threatened? Then Buffy rejects Spike using very same words as Cecily had so long ago. He was “beneath” her. After that Spike had vowed that he would be the master of his own life and had asserted his power over everyone he could, including two slayers. So his reaction to her stinging words – arming himself with a shotgun and aiming to kill Buffy no matter what the cost – was entirely in keeping for him. But when he sees her vulnerable, just when he should by all counts want to assert himself, to show who was master, all he wants to do is comfort her. The contrast to the earlier scene where he killed the slayer in New York and swore he would do the same to Buffy seems deliberate. Here the writers are establishing that Spike’s feelings towards Buffy were very different from those he held towards the other slayers. Of course the writers are at pains to show that darkness is at the heart of the relationship between the two of them. There is a nice piece of foreshadowing in the season 5 premier, “Buffy vs Dracula”. In this episode Buffy feels isolated from her friends and family because of her role as slayer. Then Dracula appears to tell her that she too a creature of darkness. She denies this of course but the vampire seems to have some sort of hold over her or attraction to her and the two of them have a couple of almost sexual encounters in which they literally feed off one another. Eventually it is when Buffy embraces the darkness within her that she regains the upper hand, becomes true to herself and prevails. And here essentially we have the Buffy/Spike relationship. When, at the start of season 6, her friends magically bring Buffy back to life we discover that she was not suffering in Hell as they had believed, but was actually in a place of peace which we may take as a sort of Heaven. As a result of being wrenched from this place, Buffy is depressed and detached from everyone. She is in particular too afraid to hurt her friends by telling them the truth about where she was. But after digging her way out of her own grave, the only person she feels she can talk to is the only person in her group who has also died and come back to life – Spike. The central idea here is that the two of them share a connection – one which the members of the Scooby gang (who had until now been the core of the show) cannot share. And it is probably no co-incidence that from the point when this connection between Buffy and Spike begins to develop the roles of others, especially Xander, diminishes. And the nature of this connection lies in more than just the circumstances of their rebirth. In “Life Serial” Spike tells Buffy that she will only truly be happy in life when she realizes she is like him - a fighter, a "creature of the darkness." And when in “Smashed” Spike discovers that he can hurt Buffy (although not other humans) their “relationship” goes to a new level. He taunts her - telling her she has come back "a little less human" - and attacks her. Buffy for her part refuses to accept what he says, and taunts him right back with his inability to be fully vampire or human. Again we have the idea of a link between them. Their physical blows turn into rough sexual foreplay and finally, sex. Of course the idea of a relationship involving characters with "something of the night" about them is integral to the very concept of a Byronic hero. Indeed Lady Caroline Lamb described the poet himself as ''mad, bad and dangerous to know'' after their first meeting, when the publication of ''Childe Harold'' made him the literary and social lion of London. Byron’s sexual excesses and attitude to women were the very stuff of gothic literature and may well have been conditioned by early experiences: a dissolute father, who deserted wife and young child; a violent-tempered mother; a sexually abusive nursemaid and homosexual attachment to a college classmate; the agony and sense of inferiority over his crippled leg, and the spell his extraordinary good looks cast over women. So it is interesting that here too the writers take some pains to suggest that Spike also suffered early trauma which affected him. For example, whereas new vampires in the Buffyverse often delight in killing their families once they become evil, Spike was a notable exception. Having always been very close to his mother, he turned her into a vampire to prevent her from dying from tuberculosis. Unfortunately, his mother, as a vampire, taunted William insinuating that William had always had a sexual fascination with her. He was forced to stake her because he could not bear to see his mother in such a twisted form. As in the case of Childe Harold, therefore, the writers emphasis is on Spike too harboring a dark secret. And there is obviously a world of difference between someone like Childe Harold (or impliedly therefore Spike) on the one hand and someone who would brutally kill his own family just for the fun of it on the other. Making Spike the victim of his own mother's abusive behavior and showing the parallels and connections between him and an ensouled human being like Buffy is much more in keeping with the idea of someone haunted by a tragic past who runs away from it to forge a new life for himself. It minimizes the idea of Spike as an irredeemable, soulless killing monster and emphasizes the idea of someone driven to do wrong by past psychological baggage but someone who can change. Take “Crush” for example. When Drusilla kills the girl in the Bronze so that Spike can feed from her, we see a situation where on the one hand Spike did not kill. On the other he could have stopped her but didn’t. In fact he was hesitant almost unsure that this is what he really wants to do. Was he influenced by his memories of what it was like to kill and feed, was he unsure of whether he could bring himself to hurt Drusilla? In contrast when Spike lost his memory in Tabula Rasa, he immediately assumed that he was a good. He believed that he has a soul, and announced that he is a "noble vampire on a mission of redemption." With no memories holding him back, we see Spike's inherent desire to be good. The evil (the suggestion seems to be) is not fundamental to his nature – it’s the result of his past. And notably of course even after he gets his soul back, Spike is not wracked by the guilt Angel feels. Nowhere do we see the idea of coping with the influence of the demonic past, of paying a price for the trail of destruction and misery he caused or even of simply changing himself becoming important themes in his existence. So, when Principal Wood seeks revenge on him for the death of his mother, the writers never even begin to address the issue of forgiveness or repentance. Rather, again and again they stress that what really motivates Spike is his need for Buffy’s love and trust. At one point he tells Buffy: "Now, you listen to me. I’ve been alive a bit longer than you. And dead a lot longer than that. I’ve seen things you couldn’t imagine - done things I’d prefer you didn’t. I don’t exactly have a reputation for being a thinker. I follow my blood. Which doesn’t exactly rush in the direction of my brain. I've made a lot of mistakes. A lot of wrong bloody calls. A hundred plus years and there’s only one thing I’ve ever been sure of. You." From the point when he puts the shotgun down in “Fool for Love” he symbolically rejects evil not for good - he remains a morally ambiguous figure - but for love. It is to help her (and indeed slake his desire for violence) that he becomes a more active participant in the Scooby Gang, jumping into several of Buffy's fights to provide assistance whether she wants it or not. When Buffy rejects his advances in the episode "Crush", Spike attempts to prove his love by kidnapping her to witness him killing Drusilla for her. When Buffy rejects him again he goes into a rage about women being so difficult. But when Drusilla breaks free and goes after Buffy while she is still chained up, Spike saves Buffy. When Spike has Warren Mears make a robot in Buffy's likeness that is programmed to love and obey him, he could have made Buffy in any image he wanted – even an evil one. But he didn’t. The Buffybot was still recognizable Buffy, again emphasizing that this is not just some sexual obsession. It is rather a matter of his genuine regard for her. And because of this regard for Buffy Spike himself behaves with honor, decency and self-sacrifice. In “Intervention” he refused to reveal the identity of 'The Key' (Dawn Summers) to Glory, even under intense torture. Buffy is moved by his loyalty and kisses him, telling she will not forget what he has done. In the final showdown with Glory, Spike fights by Buffy's side, earning her trust. After Buffy dies Spike honors her memory by remaining loyal to the Scooby Gang, fighting at their side and serving the role of a protector and almost father-figure for Dawn. As we have seen, in season 6 when Buffy is struggling to cope with her return to Earth and to learn her origins and what being 'less than human' means, she gets Spike to help her as a guide. In “Life Serial” she trusts him enough to become very drunk with Spike at his crypt and Buffy goes with Spike to a bar where he plays poker (using kittens as currency). After the poker game ends badly, Buffy rants to Spike about the new low her life has reached with her inability to understand school or get a decent job. It seems almost as if she has come to count on him: "You were gonna help me. You were gonna bust heads and fix my life." When his actions fall short of her expectations, she says, "The only person I can stand to be around is a neutered vampire that cheats at kitten poker." What we have here is a sense of someone whose actions are being driven by love rather than the darkness within him. And for the sake of that love he ultimately turns his back upon the darkness. In the episode "As You Were", Buffy tells Spike that she is using him and ends the relationship that began so brutally in “Smashed”. Believing he still has a chance with Buffy after seeing her reactions of jealousy and hurt when he has a drunk sexual encounter with Anya, Spike corners her and makes aggressive sexual advances. When she refuses him, he grows desperate and unsuccessfully tries to rape her. But he is horrified by his own actions and intentions. It is then that Spike heads to a remote area of Africa, where he seeks out a legendary demon shaman and undergoes the Demon Trials, a series of gruelling physical challenges. Proving his worthiness by surviving the trials, Spike asks the shaman: "So you'll give me what I want. Make me what I was, so Buffy can get what she deserves." And thus he gets his soul back. Driven on by a reaction against of his dark past and a determination to change Spike decides that wants to be "a man" rather than "a monster." In “The Gift”, he told Buffy that he loved her because she treats him "like a man”. He tells Buffy in “Smashed” that "a man can change," identifying himself as a man, but Buffy tells him that he is a “thing”. By “Seeing Red, he has become convinced that he "can't be a man" as he is. So, in order to become a man, Spike gets a soul. In other words we have someone who was cursed by a darkness from the past. That darkness cuts him off from normal society. He owes it no loyalty and indeed only has contempt for it. But at the same time he is unhappy with his situation. He is also a man of larger than life passions and these exhibit themselves in the form of a romantic love for a woman. Yet because of his past and who he is this woman van never be his. In the end, however, he goes on a quest to change himself. There could be nothing more typical of a Byronic hero. The problem with this is that it turns the mythology of BtVS on its head. For five years, the plotlines revolved, to a greater or lesser degree, around the fact that soulless creatures are different to human beings and are irredeemably evil. That does not always mean they will act in an evil way or that humans will always act in a good way. Take an example. A and B are brothers. A is human and B is a vampire. If A comes across an elderly woman trying to cross the road against difficult traffic he helps her and that makes him feel good because he has done something good. If B had come across the same scene he would have thrown her in front of the traffic and that would have made him feel good because he had done something evil. Suppose, however, the elderly woman was A and B’s mother who had just fallen out with A and was on her way to change her will in favor of B and cut A out. To stop her A threw her in front of the traffic. That made him feel very bad but hey she has a lot of money. On the other hand B would then be forced to save her. That would make him feel bad because he was helping a human. But hey she has a lot of money. But it does mean that the way humans and vampires look at the universe is fundamentally different and from that flows everything else. If this were not the case then firstly it implies that the nature of vampires is not immutable and that accordingly Buffy really is a murderer; she's spent the last six years killing beings capable of being good people. And it follows from this that the human soul is irrelevant – there is really no difference between humans and vampires except that vampires are much stronger and live forever. There are no “monsters” at all. There are monstrous acts but people do monstrous acts too. And there is another point too. In Spike’s case the writers have put forward the idea of love of Buffy as the reason for Spike's willingness to help her and her sister and ultimately redeem himself. But there is no attempt to address what if any differences may exist between the human concept of love and a vampire’s. Regardless of Spike's ability to change it is established that when Spike fell in love with Buffy he was a soulless killer - albeit a neutered one. For humans the ideal of love is that you put the other person first. You are not interested in what you can get out of the relationship but rather what you can give. Of course we messy, imperfect humans don't always live up to this ideal and even when we do we can't seem to stay true to it. But if we do love someone this is what we all try to aim for in a relationship. In a way it is like the Whedonverse ideal of the soul. The soul has an instinct to do good; but it doesn't always stay true to that instinct. In that sense human love is a reflection of the nature of human beings. There are of course many kinds of love of which a vampire would be capable. An individual can feel affection for a prized possession and can care for it, want to protect it and keep it safe accordingly. But he does so essentially because he enjoys the possession. Alternatively an individual can have many emotional needs – insecurity, vanity even lust – satisfied by a relationship and want to preserve the other person. But none of this amounts to love in the same sense that human love is meant. So, does it not follow that a vampires must have a different idea of love to humans? The relationship between Darla and Angelus certainly could not be described as love in the human sense that I have described. And if vampire love can be essentially unselfish, how does that relate to the fundamentally different view that a vampire has of the world. Nowhere do the writers evidence any interest is this issue
Aftermath In one sense, because he has his soul back, Spike's behavior in the seventh and final season of BtVS does not represent the same problems as his behavior as a soulless vampire in earlier season does. We can, therefore, understand why, after first overcoming what seems like a bout of insanity caused by the return of his soul, Spike sets himself the task of regaining Buffy’s trust after the attempted rape. And ultimately from his point of view season 7 is about his success in doing so. Under influence of the First Evil's hypnotic trigger, Spike unknowingly starts killing again. After he discovers what he has done, he begs Buffy to stake him, but she refuses and takes him into her house, telling him she has seen him change. Buffy guards and cares for Spike throughout his recovery, telling Spike that she believes in him, a statement which later sustains him throughout his imprisonment and torture at the hands of the First. There is undoubtedly a sado-masochistic sub-theme running through this relationship but I have no intention of going there. Anyway, when Spike's chip begins to malfunction, causing him intense pain and threatening to kill him, Buffy trusts him enough to order the Initiative operatives to remove it from his head. Later in the season, Spike and Buffy achieve an emotional closeness; they spend two nights together, one of which Spike describes as the best night of his life, just holding her. And Spike remains loyal to her even when the other members of the Scooby Gang and the potential slayers do not. But I find these developments pat, untruthful and morally problematic. The nature of the Buffy/Spike relationship is a highly ambiguous one both from a psychological and from a moral perspective. It is a relationship between an unrepentant killer and someone who is supposed to defend innocents from creatures like him. It marked by both psychological and physical abuse, culminating in an attempted rape. I have already referred to Spike's feelings of frustration in "Crushed". And again in "Wrecked" he tells Buffy
This is someone who, as we have already seen, experienced rejection and scorn and powerlessness and hated it. Again he is feeling rejected, hurt and angry - with the consequences we saw in "Seeing Red". Buffy's own attitude to Spike is a mixture of attraction and loathing - loathing of who he is, what he has done and of herself for being attracted to him. In fact up until "Seeing Red" more often than not she was the instigator of the violence and the sex. There are a world of issues between them. But none of them are dealt with properly. In the final battle inside the Hellmouth, Spike, wearing a mystical amulet, sacrifices himself to destroy the Turok-Han and close the Hellmouth. He is slowly incinerated in the process, but not before Buffy tells him "I love you." He replies, "No, you don't but thanks for saying it." This suggests that Spike has gained some sort of peace with Buffy not loving him. But how or why is never explained. Has his feeling of frustration changed? Has he lost his sense of anger at not being in control of his life? There is nothing to suggest this. Worse still is Buffy's attitude towards him. She accepts him in spite of everything that has gone before because he has changed and shown her penance. But that sort of resolution required the writers to deal with his past as a murdering monster in general and his attack on her in particular in a serious and respectful manner worthy of the subject. They did no such thing. What we require is a proper moral regeneration for the wrong-doer - a facing up to consequences of his actions, a good faith effort to change internally and a demonstration that he has changed as well. But here the idea of change and redemption is taken care of by a pat mystical answer - he is given back his soul. And that really is it: he stops being a monster because of that. That kind of easy-way out is not only problematic from a moral perspective. It also shows the deep confusion between on the one hand the metaphysics of the soul (the ability to choose between right and wrong) and on the other the psychological flaws which influence those choices. For example it begs the question: to what extent was the rape caused by Spike's lack of a soul and to what extent by his psychological flaws. And how does getting his soul back without addressing the latter affect him? Answer came there none; and sadly this is all too typical of ME's treatment of the character.
Chapter III:
Conviction It is as an incorporeal being resurrected by the amulet that Spike starts of the fifth and final season in ANGEL. His migration to this show was a matter of some controversy. But the truth is that, from a thematic point of view, the introduction of Spike to ANGEL has one great strength. There are many points of comparison between him and Angel. They are both vampires with a long history of great brutality. Both eventually came by a soul. The mere possession of that soul did not, though, immediately turn them into crusaders against evil. In fact the mere possession of a soul didn’t even turn them into decent people. Rather it led them on a journey of self-discovery and in the course of that journey a certain blonde slayer had a major influence. These similarities, however, simply served to highlight the differences between them. Angel had his soul thrust upon him as punishment. This soul (as was intended) led him not only to fully understand the evil nature of what he did, but also the difference between that evil and good. Spike, on the other hand, sought his soul out as a way of seeking an answer to his personal woes. There is, therefore, much scope here for a comparison between Angel and Spike, a comparison that helped greatly to illustrate not only the differences in character between them but perhaps even more interestingly thematic issues that were important in season 5. And in season 5 of ANGEL the theme was destiny. In season 4 the writers explored the related issue of free will and in particular stressed the importance of having and exercising the power of choice. But in season 5 they then went on to look at the way in which Angel, even though he had this power of choice, allowed his life to be dictated by his own past and the psychological baggage he carried with him from that past. They also focussed on how this in turn allowed outside forces instead of himself to control his destiny. Finally they showed what he needed to take back that control into his own hands. The contrast between him and Spike helped to emphasise the point. For much of the first part of season 5 the writers showed Spike’s ability to control his own destiny – to make the choices that he wants to unconstrained by outside factors. I have already referred to the flashback in “Destiny” where we see Spike learn a painful lesson at Angelus’ hands about the need to take control of his own life. And in his actions in LA we see how well he learned the lesson. In this episode he compares the way he got his soul with the way Angel got his: “You had a soul forced on you…as a curse. Make you suffer for all the horrible things you'd done. But me... I fought for my soul. Went through the demon trials. Almost did me in a dozen times over, but I kept fighting. 'Cause I knew it was the right thing to do. It's my destiny.” When Spike decided that he wanted something he just took it. And this is where we come to the Shanshu Prophecy and the Cup of Perpetual Torment. Sirk describes the effect of drinking from the cup: "He will have the weight of worlds upon him, binding his limbs, grinding his bones to meal until he saves creation... or destroys it." But that doesn’t worry Spike in the least. His reaction is: “Uh...right. So, what's in it for me?” And it is what he hears next that really interests him: Sirk: “The vampire will have his past washed clean.” Angel: “And live again in mortal form. Yeah, that part I know.” Spike was not concerned about the implications of the prophecy for others, about the possibility that the vampire with a soul would destroy creation. Indeed he is openly contemptuous of Angel’s concerns for and desire to help others: “Oh, yeah. Look at you. Thinking you're the big savior—fighting for truth, justice, and soccer moms—but you still can't lay flesh on a cross without smelling like bacon, can you?” As he says himself he is interested in the Shanshu prophecy for what it means for him. But why he wants the cup is far less important than the fact that once he set his sights on it he let nothing stand in his way until he got it. There is clarity of purpose and single mindedness for you. In contrast to Spike, in “Destiny” Angel feared the Shanshu prophecy, not just because of the torment promised in the course of the apocalypse but for the potential burden of guilt that it carried. So, when he hears about the Cup he doesn’t simply rush after it. He is if anything reluctant to go and only does so because it was the only way he could think of to stop the madness at Wolfram and Hart and because Spike forced the issue by taking off for Nevada- where it is - himself. Then, when faced with Spike at the Opera House, he is indecisive, unsure what to do. It is Spike who forces the fight. It is therefore no wonder that it is Spike who wins.
Me, Myself and I But the contrast between Angel and Spike also serves to illustrate another, connected, point. In “Soul Purpose” the writers toy with the idea of Spike supplanting Angel. So, we have an extended homage to “City of…”. A mysterious character calling himself Doyle meets someone whom he describes as “feeling kinda lost.” Only “Doyle” (or as we know him Lindsey) isn’t acting on his own initiative, at least that’s his story. He tells Spike “I'm just doing what they tell me." We gather that the mysterious “they” are TPTB, because at this point “Doyle” uses the universal gesture of pointing upwards when referring to a higher power. He then describes himself in the following terms: “Look, I'm just a guy. I'm nobody. A drifter. I was minding my own business, and then one day…wham! I start having these visions.” These visions are “like brain pictures, but they hurt. Like when you eat ice cream too fast. You start seeing people in trouble... who need a champion.” Guided by this vision Spike saves a girl in a dark alley and later on two more people, this time using the very same hidden-stakes-in-wrist devices that we saw Angel use in the Series premier. Afterwards “Doyle” leads Spike back to a basement apartment, describing it in these terms: “Building's quiet. Windows don't get direct sunlight. You've got a sewer entrance for your daytime travel.” The references to the first meeting between Doyle and Angel are too close to be co-incidental. But to drive the point home, “Doyle” deliberately and favorably compares Spike to Angel, for example when he says that: “From what I hear Angel didn't save the girl on his first mission.” This prompts the following exchange: Spike: “What's Angel got to do with this?” “Doyle”: “Well... nothin'. Not anymore.” Finally even Spike himself seems to swallowed what “Doyle” was telling him because when faced with a direct question about his identity he says: “I’m the Hero” But while on the surface the impression is being given that Spike is supplanting Angel, the underlying message is very different. This is because, while there are similarities in the scenes between “Doyle” and Spike in “Soul Purpose” and between Angel and the real Doyle in “City Of”, the differences are much more fundamental. The key message that the real Doyle brought to Angel was this: “It’s not all about fighting and gadgets and stuff. It’s about reaching out to people, showing them that there’s love and hope still left in the world. It’s about letting them into your heart. It’s not about saving lives; it’s about saving souls. Hey, possibly your own in the process." And yet Spike treats those he saves with indifference or even contempt: Girl: “Thank you! Thank you! That thing was gonna kill me!” Spike: “Well, what do you expect? Out alone in this neighborhood? I got half a mind to kill you myself, you half-wit.” Girl: “What?!” Spike: “I mean, honestly, what kind of retard wears heels like that in a dark alley? Take 2 steps, break your bloody ankle.” Girl: “I was just trying to get home.” Spike: “Well, get a cab, you moron. And on the way, if a stranger offers you candy, don't get in the van! Stupid cow.” His idea of getting into people’s lives is asking the women he saved if they would: “like to get a bottle of hootch and listen to some Sex Pistols records with him.” As “Destiny” showed, Spike’s desire to control his own fate was simply a matter of personal fulfillment, nothing more. As I have already pointed out even as a human, William’s idea of romantic love seemed to be more about what was important to him as opposed to being about the other person. as a vampire he equated helping others with weakness. Even with a soul, in “Unleashed”, for example, there was no trace of understanding about what Nina is going through or sympathy for her. As far as he was concerned there is only one person who needs help in that episode and that was him. He scoffs at Angel for trying to do the right thing and even Fred realizes his motivation for being nice to her: “I know he's been playing me with the looks and the smiles. I'm not some idiot schoolgirl with a crush.” And in “Hellbound” too he shows no concern for the suffering of Pavane’s victims, even before he knew who most of them were. In part at least his attitude here was related to his misanthropic view of the world. As a human he certainly seems to have good reason to believe the worst of human beings and their motivations. In “Underneath” he paints a picture of a society that on the surface is decent and normal but has a very nasty underbelly. “We all paint on our happy faces every day, when all we really wanted is to pound the neighbor's missis, steal his Ben Franklins, and while we're at it, not think about the third of the world that's starving to death.” And in “Hole in the World” in the argument over cavemen and astronauts, Spike takes the part of the cavemen: Spike: “I am talking about something primal. Right? Savagery. Brutal animal instinct.” Angel: “And that wins out every time with you. You know, the human race has evolved, Spike! Spike: “Oh, into a bunch of namby-pamby, self-analyzing wankers who could never hope to…“ Angel: “We're bigger. We're smarter. Plus, there's a thing called teamwork, not to mention the superstitious terror of your pure aggressors!” A view of humanity in these terms would indeed encourage a degree of nihilism: the world is without value so why try to preserve it, why sacrifice for it? That is why Spike’s part in “Soul Purpose” is all about Angel and not his own role as “hero”. In that episode the central struggle was between Angel and the parasite which inflicted the hallucinations on him. Spike only features in two of these hallucinations. In both cases he appears to have taken something away from Angel. But again first impressions can be deceptive. In the first scene Angel interrupts Spike apparently having sex with Buffy who says something about going with him to the Prom. This is a reference to the season 3 BTVS episode when Angel broke up with Buffy. But this was long before Spike came on the scene. So, he didn’t replace Angel. Rather the Buffy-Angel relationship ended because of Angel’s actions and it was Angel who ended it. The parallel here is a nice one. Whatever Angel has lost isn't because Spike has taken it away. He lost it because of the choices he himself made. This becomes even more significant when we consider Spike’s triumph in ending the Apocalypse in a later hallucination. The whole scene is a fantasy. Fred congratulates the victor: “Spike, you single-handedly ended Armageddon and turned the world into a beautiful, happily-ever-after, candy mountain place where all our dreams come true.” She and the others gesture towards a window and we see a fairy-tale castle and a blue fairy floats into the rooms before spreading magic dust over Spike turning him human. And even the process of becoming human has a fantastical quality to it because of the way that Spike is referred to as becoming a “real boy”, thus picking up Pinocchio’s oft stated wish. In this we do not – indeed we cannot – get any idea of how Spike really sees himself or his destiny. The fantasy element is simply too strong for that. But we can gather its meaning when we realize that we see this whole scene from Angel’s point of view and its meaning lies in his reactions to what he sees. So, when he beholds LA burning he stands about ineffectively saying: “I have to do something. I have to get out there!” But he does nothing. And when Spike succeeds where he didn’t even try we see Angel's hand feeling for the non-existent beat of his own heart just as everyone else is listening to Spike’s. Angel allows evil to run uncontrolled outside the windows of his office while he and Wesley, Gunn, Fred and the others are reduced to by-standers. The destiny he longs for belongs to someone because that other person recognizes evil exists and goes out and does something about it. The implication is that it wasn't Angel because of Angel's own inability to do the same. And the clue here came in the last shot in which Angel, now transformed into a letter day version of Numero Cinco, sadly turns his back on the destiny that might have been his and pushes the mail truck along the corridor for the next delivery, nothing more than a servant of Wolfram and Hart. This simply reinforces the fact that this is not about Spike finding his destiny as a hero - all the evidence suggests that Spike is simply too self centered for that - but about the destiny Angel has lost. That does not of course mean that Spike is incapable of self-sacrifice. In “Chosen” he volunteered to wear the mystical amulet that Angel brought Buffy, sacrificng himself to close the Hellmouth. And in “Powerplay” Spike is the first to vote for Angel's plan to wound the Senior Partners by destroying the Circle of the Black Thorn. But in doing so, Spike was not acting out of altruistic motives to help humanity. In “Chosen”, even as he burns and crumbles to dust, Spike chuckles and revels in the destruction before him, glad to be able to see the fight to its end. And when, in "Shells", he anticipated the final struggle between Angel and the Senior Partners, Spike expressed his commitment in terms of a willingness to fight:
Spike is no coward. He has never been afraid of death or indeed suffering. He is quite prepared to go though pain and danger to get what he considers important - be that showing he is the master of two slayers or the soul he wants to find fulfilment with Buffy. As I said in my review of "Not Fade Away" it’s hard not to see in Spike’s willingness to join in a doomed effort against overwhelming odds as a reflection of the romanticism of the age into which he was born, with its elevation of emotion over reason, its emphasis on individualism and spontaneity and its devotion to a past heroic age. This was what was important to him - living a life free from the dictates of others and fighting and if necessary dying to show that he was someone of consequence. And this brings us neatly back to Lord Byron who, out of restlessness and a desire to vindicate himself in the eyes of the public as much as a a sympathy based on the country's classical heritage, threw himself into the cause of Greek independence and in death becoming a Greek national hero. Among the lines he penned on the subject are some which recalled another heroic stand against hopeless odds:
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