Generation Lapse: The Problematic Parenting of Joyce Summers and Rupert Giles
Department
English
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2001
Abstract
Much of the storytelling on Buffy: the Vampire Slayer has focused on Buffy’s and her contemporaries’ efforts to subdue a number of external threats: the Master who plans to reopen the Hell Mouth and destroy the world; Mayor Wilkins’ diabolical intention to enslave and destroy all humankind; Adam’s Frankensteinian plot to create of super- race of human-demon hybrids. But the most perilous threats to Buffy’s, and indeed, her generation’s, welfare has come from much closer to home. The parenting by and of her mother Joyce and her Watcher Giles is a recurrent theme on the series, one which strongly suggests that the monsters Buffy and her cohorts slay are not limited to those that exist more comfortably beyond their immediate households but also threaten their safety within them.
Journal Title
Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies
Volume
2
Issue
1