Thinking about this some more -- the basic assumption is that the values Anya adopts are the central values that the USA as a whole extols ("they used to say, 'who's my little patriot, you?' when I was younger and therefore smaller than I am today"). I think Anya's views line up fairly well with the "American Dream" with an extra emphasis on money (and a great apartment) as the primary measure of success, but with marriage as a secondary value. BUT it is also really the case that there is no one true dominant ideology. Whether Anya's strong beliefs coincide with an actual "American dream" or a TV version of what Americans believe is the American dream is another issue. (Anya is one of the few characters who is not overly pop culture savvy -- which could mean either that she's less prone to influence from the media than the other characters, or, more likely I think, less able to recognize and decode the implicit messages within pop culture.)
The fact that the show takes the tactic of a) showing Anya not actually helping the oppressed women, and b) satirizing all of Anya's strong philosophical beliefs, rather than just her present-day ones, may be a failure to engage fully with the possibility of the lower class, as you suggest.
It is interesting that in her very first appearance, Anya CREATES a hell of mass production that leads to Cordelia, the wisher, being killed -- but paradoxically, it's also a world in which Cordelia's cultural dominance (Cordelia's parents being genuinely rich rather than petty bourgeoisie, before the IRS incident) is overturned by the "proletariat" of the school in Xander and Willow (who is petty bourgeoisie by economic status but is the oppressed socially). I suppose this conception of vampires as overturning the social order through mass production prefigures/ties into Spike's association of himself with the working class within the Industrial Revolution in Fool for Love. And hey -- when they set up the blood-pumping machine, the person whom they kill is Aura, one of Cordelia's (implied: rich) friends. (But also a racial minority!) So there is a bit of a post-French Revolution guillotining aristocrats vibe to the revenge against Cordelia and Aura, as well as parallels with Anne in the fascism, people being consumed entirely by machines system. The French Revolution model actually may fit with Anya's championing of the lower classes -- the entire social order is overturned, and while she is in principle enacting a wish for Cordelia, it's the Cordettes, the school's economic elite, who are most dramatically killed (that is, before Buffy's entry disrupts the natural flow -- Buffy only enters the narrative from "outside," via Cordelia's knowledge outside the narrative frame Anya had created).
I am rambling and don't know where, if anywhere, I'm going with this -- except that vampires are demonic representations of both nightmare versions of transgression against moral/social taboos in a way that is potentially freeing but also destructive, and of nightmare versions of hierarchical order (primarily the Master, though Angel too). So I have trouble decoding all the references, though I think it's best understood as Willow-Xander and the other vampires ascending to power by becoming the new dominant class (or I guess servants to the state, the state being the Master), a revolution for purely personal gain. Vamp!Willow is both Willow's first chance to access the possibility of her non-normative sexuality and to break out of forms of oppression, but Vamp!Willow also does so by attempting to reestablish an alternate order with the same implicit hierarchy as the Master had, not to mention the being entirely selfish/monstrous. Spike frees Buffy from social constraints but he's also a man who wants to dominate her.
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branchandroot
Re: cont'd
Date: 2012-12-01 03:19 am (UTC)Thinking about this some more -- the basic assumption is that the values Anya adopts are the central values that the USA as a whole extols ("they used to say, 'who's my little patriot, you?' when I was younger and therefore smaller than I am today"). I think Anya's views line up fairly well with the "American Dream" with an extra emphasis on money (and a great apartment) as the primary measure of success, but with marriage as a secondary value. BUT it is also really the case that there is no one true dominant ideology. Whether Anya's strong beliefs coincide with an actual "American dream" or a TV version of what Americans believe is the American dream is another issue. (Anya is one of the few characters who is not overly pop culture savvy -- which could mean either that she's less prone to influence from the media than the other characters, or, more likely I think, less able to recognize and decode the implicit messages within pop culture.)
The fact that the show takes the tactic of a) showing Anya not actually helping the oppressed women, and b) satirizing all of Anya's strong philosophical beliefs, rather than just her present-day ones, may be a failure to engage fully with the possibility of the lower class, as you suggest.
It is interesting that in her very first appearance, Anya CREATES a hell of mass production that leads to Cordelia, the wisher, being killed -- but paradoxically, it's also a world in which Cordelia's cultural dominance (Cordelia's parents being genuinely rich rather than petty bourgeoisie, before the IRS incident) is overturned by the "proletariat" of the school in Xander and Willow (who is petty bourgeoisie by economic status but is the oppressed socially). I suppose this conception of vampires as overturning the social order through mass production prefigures/ties into Spike's association of himself with the working class within the Industrial Revolution in Fool for Love. And hey -- when they set up the blood-pumping machine, the person whom they kill is Aura, one of Cordelia's (implied: rich) friends. (But also a racial minority!) So there is a bit of a post-French Revolution guillotining aristocrats vibe to the revenge against Cordelia and Aura, as well as parallels with Anne in the fascism, people being consumed entirely by machines system. The French Revolution model actually may fit with Anya's championing of the lower classes -- the entire social order is overturned, and while she is in principle enacting a wish for Cordelia, it's the Cordettes, the school's economic elite, who are most dramatically killed (that is, before Buffy's entry disrupts the natural flow -- Buffy only enters the narrative from "outside," via Cordelia's knowledge outside the narrative frame Anya had created).
I am rambling and don't know where, if anywhere, I'm going with this -- except that vampires are demonic representations of both nightmare versions of transgression against moral/social taboos in a way that is potentially freeing but also destructive, and of nightmare versions of hierarchical order (primarily the Master, though Angel too). So I have trouble decoding all the references, though I think it's best understood as Willow-Xander and the other vampires ascending to power by becoming the new dominant class (or I guess servants to the state, the state being the Master), a revolution for purely personal gain. Vamp!Willow is both Willow's first chance to access the possibility of her non-normative sexuality and to break out of forms of oppression, but Vamp!Willow also does so by attempting to reestablish an alternate order with the same implicit hierarchy as the Master had, not to mention the being entirely selfish/monstrous. Spike frees Buffy from social constraints but he's also a man who wants to dominate her.