Been thinking a lot of about a trend in the fantasy genre, specifically young adult fantasy, and most recently with Neil Gaiman's horror novel Caroline. But since I haven't read Caroline, well except for the book jacket and several pages in a book store, I'll focus on other heroines such as Dorothy in Wizard of OZ, Alice Liddell in her Adventures Through the Looking Glass and in Wonderland.. In all three of these works, the male author has thrust his preadolescent heroine into an alternate reality where they must access some dark portion of themselves to find their way back to their home reality. Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carrol) sends little Alice (in real life Alice Liddell) into a make-believe reality in his novels. The novels are stories that he wrote for a young girl that he may have had more than just a friendly attachment to. (According to a recent biography of Dodgson, SHE STILL HAUNTS ME by Katie Roiphe, Alice's parents cut off the relationship with Dodgson just before Alice reached puberty, at age 11, leaving Dodgson a bit of a nervous wreck. Dodgson's relationship with Alice is similar to Buffy and Giles or Fred and Sieble's.) Frank L. Baum similarly sends his girl heroine off to OZ via a tornado. And Neil Gaiman sends little Caroline into another world through a door in her house. Each heroine is forced to face their worst fears in order to return home. They have to endure hardships first, such as a wicked witch capturing and threatening their friends and accusing them of murder, or a red queen threatening their head, or a new family treating them like a slave.
Winnifred Burke, a promising student in quantum physics, who spends her free time working in the University Library, one day happens upon a mystical book about portals. Intrigued she opens it and reads a phrase that appears to be written backwards. (Through the Looking Glass, Ats 2). It's a puzzle to Winnifred (nicknamed Fred) and she works it out. By working it out - she is sucked into another world - a hell dimension where everything she knows is twisted. Instead of animals being cattle, humans are. Fred, who ironically hails from Texas, (Fredless, Ats. Season 3) a huge cattle state, known for it's cows, suddenly finds herself treated like the cattle that she may have seen growing up. And demon-like creatures are the masters. (See Through the Looking Glass, Ats Season 2). Later we learn that the puzzle Fred found was planted in the library by her professor and trusted mentor, a mentor she'd idolized, named Edward Sieble. (Supersymmetry, Ats 4) He'd apparently felt threatened by poor Fred and decided to send her off to another world. Most of Sieble's young interns appear to be women, the latest an attractive blond. Whether Sieble had more than a passing interest in these women is not explored, but what is explored is how much he is threatened by certain students, threatened to the extent that he sends them to another world. Upon Fred's return to academia - Seible comments on how she's grown. In Lewis Carrol's books, Alice similarly grows and changes each time she's forced to answer a rhyme or mathematical dilemma in the hellish wonderlands she's been sent to either through a looking glass or down a rabbit hole. First she's tiny and the world overwhelms her, later she's huge and the world seems oddly insignificant. Fred has similar experiences - overwhelmed by her new dimension and its rules, yet her mental acumen provides her with the means of surviving there.
In Supersymmetry, when Fred tells Gunn about the speech she's about to give, she's says how everything has in fact worked out for the best, if she hadn't been sent to Pylea (the alternate dimension) she may never have discovered her string theory and wouldn't be doing this speech. Likewise Alice finds a oddly written phrase and holds it up to her Looking Glass and in doing so is transported to another world - the Looking Glass World, where everything in her own world is twisted and altered. Chess pieces are rulers. Toys talk. She is somehow at their mercy as opposed to the other way around. And to get out? She must solve an increasing series of mathematical games and rhymes to escape just as Fred attempts to solve a series of mathematical puzzles to escape her new world. Dodgson like Siebel is a mathematician. The mathematical rhyne is the way in and the way out.
Both Fred and Alice enter these dimensions as children, adolescents, innocent in all these things and escape them with a renewed awareness of their own inner darkness, the innocence forever lost. Unlike Alice, Fred is not permitted to escape Pylea on her own. She has to be rescued from it by Angel Investigations. Just as she is not permitted by Gunn in Supersymmetry to decide whether or not to kill Professor Siebel. Gunn takes her choice upon himself, by killing the Professor instead of letting Fred send him to hell. Keeping Fred the innocent little girl that stays in Gunn's head, protecting her from her own vengeful inclinations and from tainting his own views of her. "I don't want to lose you," he says.
Several posts on the boards seemed amazed by Fred's misreading of Gunn. I found Gunn's misread of Fred far more interesting. When Fred threatens to kill Seibel. Gunn suggests giving her hot coca. It reminds me of the episode Double Or Nothing - where Gunn's idea of a romantic goodbye to Fred is cotton candy, carousels, pancakes, and wonderful treats. Then instead of confiding in Fred about what he did, he protects her. Fred - Gunn believes must be protected. He treats her the same way (sans sex) as he did his younger sister, Alonna, as someone to be protected. A child. Wes on the other hand seems to accept Fred's assertion that she neither requires nor wants his assistance in taking down Seible. He has provided her with the necessary information. Now she must handle Seible on her own. Wes appears to respect her enough to let her do it. He does not endeavor to protect her.
By breaking Seibel's neck and throwing him into the abyss, Gunn took on Fred's decision. Whether she would have closed the portal in time or rescued the Professor herself? We'll never know for certain. My guess is she would have pushed him in the dimension. But this isn't important. What's important and may in fact be the first of many cracks in their relationship - is Gunn felt the need to nullify Fred's choice, to protect Fred from herself, keeping her the little girl at least inside his own head. While Wes showed Fred that he saw her as a woman and respected her as such.
Jumping over to Cordelia, who is the other little girl lost. Cordy is the one who discovers Fred's predicament in Pylea, in Through the Looking Glass. Prior to this episode, Cordy had lost everything due to the stupidity and greed of her father. Cast outside the family home to fend for herself, she struggles for years in LA, fending off poverty, fighting demons, and struggling with painful visions of horrendous acts beyond her imagination. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ she is scooped up by the portal winds in Through the Looking Glass and thrust into another world where she becomes first a slave and then a princess and finally the inadvertent savior of a people. Dorothy, while not becoming a slave, does slowly become the savior by ridding OZ of its number one villain, the Wicked Witch. Cordy unlike Fred is empowered in Pylea. Her visions save her from Fred's fate as a slave, imprisoning her instead in the palace where she must make a choice between "queen-dom" and being a "champion" beside her friends. (There's no Place like Grbltz, Angel Season 2) Like Fred, Cordy wrestles with male champions fighting for her honor: Groo and Angel. But in the end it is Cordelia who makes the choice, kills the wretched demons keeping her prisoner and ensures the group's safe return to LA, through the same series of words that Dorothy used in the Wizard of OZ. "There's no place like…"
Cordy is given a similar choice much later in Season 3, Ats. Where Skip, a self-proclaimed agent of the Powers That Be, tells her that she has been chosen to ascend to a higher level. Just as she's about to reveal her true feelings to Angel - she chooses instead to go up into the heavens, where she is encased in a mystical prison of pure light and joy, given the ability to see everything but do nothing regarding any of it. Her encasement in the light is viewed by Angel in Grounded as a wonderful thing. She is safe. Protected. In a better place. Forever the little girl or "perfect" woman. It would be wrong of him to pull her out of there. Cordelia meanwhile is wondering if Angel is deficient and when he's going to figure out how to get her out of there. Frustrated and bored, she witnesses Angel lose a portion of himself in Las Vegas and attempts to do something to save him and their friends - her actions enable Angel to save his friends and somehow thrusts her back to earth without her memory.
When Angel finds Cordy sans memory, he proceeds to protect her, by lying to her. He attempts in a way to do the same thing Gunn does with Fred, to preserve the innocence. Telling her about vampires, demons, etc will only scare her, he reasons. So Angel does the same he's done to every woman he's fallen for, he protects her from the ugly dark world. In doing so, he drives her from his house when she discovers his lies and his attempts to protect her from them. She takes off with his son, Connor, who also escaped from another dimension and was lied to by Angel. Connor, like Wesely with Fred, does not attempt to protect Cordelia from the dark. He takes her demon hunting, informing her that she used to be a demon hunter and this is probably what she is missing. Angel bristles at this knowledge. "I staked a vampire yesterday," Cordelia tells him. "What? He took you demon hunting?" Angel responds, horrified. To which Cordelia responds, "I'm the same woman I always was, I can take care of myself, I do not need to be protected."
Fred and Cordy are paralleled in Supersymmetry and even to some extent in the whole Pylea arc, Through the Looking Glass and There's No Place like Grbltz, both lost girls. Cordy lost her innocence long ago in Sunnydale. Fred lost hers in Pylea. Now Cordy has found herself back on earth without a memory or any sense of who she is. And Fred is beginning to see the depths of her own dark nature and that of those around her. Neither are little girls any more. Cordy struggles with the oedipal desires of Connor, the son of a man/vampire she can barely remember but senses she once had a relationship with. Fred struggles with her professor's jealousy, her own desires for vengeance and her romantic ideals.
It was easier in a way for Fred to believe the portal just opened due to a phrase she uttered. The fact it was her idol and mentor who opened it, thrusts Fred into a whirlwind of emotions that are as disorienting as being thrust through the looking glass into Pylea.
Professor Siebel's motivations for sending Fred through that portal may be as complex as Fred's reaction to the knowledge he did it. It's possible that the mentoring relationship between Siebel and Fred was far closer than we know. Fred tells us she had wanted to be a history major but fell in love with Physics during Sieble's lecture. Seible appears to have taken a shine to Fred, mentioning how he gave her an A- on her last exam because he knew she could do better. That physics came naturally for her. She trusts him enough to jot down her home phone number and address. Seible's relationship to Fred reminds me of two other famous or rather infamous mentor-student relationships: the relationship between Scolari and Mozart, Mozart the young protégée and Scolari the aging composer who no matter how hard or long he works (see the play Amadeus), he'll never achieve Mozart's brilliance and is thrilled when Mozart dies. Or the story of Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon's mathematical genius is envied by the MIT Mathematics Professor who yearns for a similar brilliance yet knows he'll never achieve it. Yet in all three relationships, we have a sense that the teacher is half in love with the student. It's a warped love, filled with jealousy. Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) may have had a similar relationship with his dear Alice.
What's intriguing to me is what many posters see as a plot: how Seibel got Fred into Pylea. He did not push her into it. Instead she discovered a book in the library and worked out a puzzle, which sent her there. Similarly, Alice is sent through the looking glass to wonderland - through a puzzle. Seibel seduces Fred to Pylea. He seduces her brain. What we don't see is how. But it's not hard to imagine: he may have told her to hunt down the book or possibly mentioned it off hand to her in either a lecture or in a student-teacher consultation. I remember my teachers sending me off after books as a student. So when Fred does disappear and goes literally through the looking glass, she has fallen into Sieble's trap and the only way out is to figure out the mathematical puzzle he set up for, which she spends the next six years trying to work out on the walls of a cave. A formula that requires the ingredient that Cordelia and company discover within the books of the demon monks ruling the dimension. Together they escape and Fred discovers her breakthrough in string theory.
The breakthrough is interesting - what we learn of it anyway.
Cribbing from Cjl's post on Supersymmetry: "Supersymmetry is a remarkable symmetry. In elementary particle physics, it interchanges particles of completely dissimilar types--the types called fermions (such as electrons, protons and neutrons), which make up the material world, and those called bosons (such as photons), which generate the forces of nature. Fermions are inherently the individualists and loners of the quantum particle world: no two fermions ever occupy the same quantum state. Their aversion to close company is strong enough to hold up a neutron star against collapse even when the crushing weight of gravity has overcome every other force of nature. Bosons, in contrast, are convivial copycats and readily gather in identical states. Every boson in a particular state encourages more of its species to emulate it..."
Yet, somehow in the mirror of supersymmetry, standoffish fermions look magically like sociable bosons, and vice versa...All the ordinary symmetries of physics lack sorcery. Those symmetries may act like the distorting mirrors of a funhouse, making familiar electrons look like ghostly neutrinos, for instance, but they can never change a fermion into a boson. Only supersymmetry does that."
-- Jan Jolie, "Uncovering Supersymmetry" (Scientific American, July 2002 (p. 71)
In Pylea - Fred becomes the fermion, standoffish, removed, while Cordelia becomes the sociable boson, in control part of the social order. When they jump back to their own dimension, Fred gradually pulls out of her cave-like room and becomes more and more like the sociable boson, engages in a romance with Gunn, becoming pseudo-parent to Connor, intriguing Wesely, and re-engaging with the academic community. Cordelia on the other hand, becomes more and more a fermion with her new powers and when she ascends then descends again? She has no memory, removes herself from the AI family, relying on another outcast Connor, and is largely set apart. They become distorted mirrors of each other. Cordelia's ascension has set her apart from others, while Fred's exile appears to have brought her back into the social net.
Fred's discovery - changes her societal relationships. Gunn feels cut off from her yet supportive. Angel seems to feel removed. Wes finally after almost six months interacts with Fred again. And Seibel feels threatened. Both Gunn and Angel immediately go into Riley Finn mode - we must protect the damsel, after all women must be protected. While Wes engages Fred on a mental level and respects her decision or rather her right to make one, even if he may not agree with it or see it as being the correct one. He has learned that people must make their own mistakes and there is little you can do to stop it. (See Sleep Tight - Slouching Towards Bethlehem). Cordelia has a similar problem - Cordy's breakthrough - breaking out of her mystical prison, has cut her off from Angel and the others. Only Connor tells her the truth and respects her right to make her own decisions - even if he may not agree with them or see them as being the correct ones. It is tempting for the viewer to see Wes and Connor as the bad guys here, yet I found both to be refreshingly honest and heroic in this episode while I wanted to knock some sense into Gunn and Angel who spent all their time in the last two episodes protecting Cordy and Fred from themselves, treating both women like lost little girls.
The irony here is in the very act of becoming lost - each girl discovers who she is. Dorothy through her journeys in OZ discovers her place is home in Kansas and what is truly important to her. Cordy through her adventures in Pylea and ascension realizes her place is with Angel Investigations. Alice in her adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - discovers that her mind is her ally and that she can choose her own destiny and is not at the whim of others. Fred through her ordeal in Pylea realizes what she is capable of and is empowered by her mental acumen and choices.
Cordy and Fred now are capable of taking care of themselves and no longer in need of protection. They are no longer lost little girls. By getting lost, they may have begun to find themselves.
Shadowkat
