This ramble is in response to Shadowkat's incisive treatise on the necessity and centrality of human connection in Buffy's world. Actually, it's not so much a response as an expansion--because, even though shadowkat presents a comprehensive analysis, I think an essential aspect of life in the Buffyverse needs to be included in order to paint a complete picture.

1. "In our extremity we must depend on ourselves"

Let's return to one of the seminal moments in the history of the series--the climax of Becoming II. Angelus had Buffy pinned down, and tried to psychologically intimidate her, play up her isolation from her friends, break down her resistance so he could land the deathblow. But Buffy was made of tougher stuff than Angelus (or Angel) could ever dream, and in that spine-tingling moment when she immobilized the blade of the oncoming sword, just inches away from her face, she displayed the inner strength (to go along with the fancy kung fu moves) that made her the heroine of postmodern feminists everywhere.

And yet, the episode was unquestionably a tragedy. Buffy triumphed, but she was forced to kill the only man she ever loved, a choice of love over duty that still haunted her in "Selfless." Thanks to Xander's lie, the post-Becoming Buffy believed all of her friends wanted Angel dead, and that none of them understood her suffering. So she isolated herself in Los Angeles ("Anne"), turning away from her friends, her family, her calling, and herself, until Chanterelle brought her back to humanity. Like the mythic heroes of old, she descended into hell and was reborn with a fresh appreciation of her unique place in society.

The events from "Becoming" through "Dead Man's Party" (and there are similar sequences all through both Buffy and Angel) demonstrate the paradox of living in Joss Whedon's universe: you desperately need connections with other human beings in order to realize your potential and your place in the world; but when it comes down to the big decisions, you have to make them alone. Buffy never would have made it to--and through--that final battle in "Becoming" without the love and support of Willow, Xander, Giles, Joyce (and Angel); but in her darkest moment, Buffy had to reach inside and summon up the strength to defeat Angelus when she thought she had no one else behind her.

For the existentialists in the audience, this is old, familiar territory. If there is no divine being, no God-given morality, then every person bears the weight of the world, and every decision we make is an act of creation in an absurd universe. We cannot shuttle the responsibility for those decisions on our loved ones, our community, our society, or the unseen force who sends the sun and the planets pinwheeling across the sky. Free will is a bitch, but that's the deal. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it--and in a world of six billion people, we're all faced with the solitude of self.

2. The Solitude of Self

The phrase "the solitude of self" has special resonance in this discussion, since it originated from one of the founders of modern American feminism, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. For those of you on the board who've never heard of Mrs. Stanton, she's an amazing story, one that's nearly been forgotten over the stormy course of the past hundred years.

Stanton (along with her lifelong friend, Susan B. Anthony) was the intellectual lifeblood of the American women's suffrage movement from its conception in the late 1840s to her death in 1902. While Anthony forged political alliances and built the nationwide organization that would eventually bring women the right to vote in 1920, Stanton built the ideological structure of the movement, hammering home the ethical and moral necessity of suffrage, connecting the issue of women's rights to its origins in abolitionism, then expanding the discussion outward to the plight of oppressed people everywhere.

In her later years--saddened by the death of her husband and hobbled by failing health--Stanton went off the lecture circuit and devoted her remaining strength to clarifying and explicating her principles in a series of brilliant (and controversial) texts. The most universal of these personal manifestos (to me, at least) was "The Solitude of Self," first and most gloriously presented to the public in her resignation speech to the Women's Suffrage Association in 1892. I'm going to skip a few of the introductory paragraphs--but for the most part, I'm not going to cut a word. ____________________________________________________________

To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us, we leave it alone, under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be just such a combination of prenatal influences; never again just such environments as make up the infancy, youth and manhood of this one. Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No one has ever found two blades of ribbon grass alike, and no one will ever find two human beings alike. Seeing, then, what must be the infinite diversity in human character, we can in a measure appreciate the loss to a nation when any class of the people is uneducated and unrepresented in the government.

We ask for the complete development of every individual, first, for his own benefit and happiness. In fitting out an army, we give each soldier his own knapsack, arms, powder, his blanket, cup, knife, fork and spoon. We provide alike for all their individual necessities; then each man bears his own burden.

Again, we ask complete individual development for the general good; for the consensus of the competent on the whole round of human interests, on all questions of national life; and here each man must bear his share of the general burden. It is sad to see how soon friendless children are left to bear their own burdens, before they can analyze their feelings; before they can even tell their joys and sorrows, they are thrown on their own resources. The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages in self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. . . .

In youth our most bitter disappointments, our brightest hopes and ambitions, are known only to ourselves. Even our friendship and love we never fully share with another; there is something of every passion, in every situation, we conceal. Even so in our triumphs and our defeats. . . .

We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike amid the greatest triumphs and darkest tragedies of life, we walk alone. On the divine heights of human attainment, eulogized and worshipped as a hero or saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty and vice, as a pauper or criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts and alleys, in by-ways and high-ways; alone we stand in the judgment seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities, hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing, then, that life must ever be a march and a battle that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.

To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work, of a voice in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Think of . . . woman's position! Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection. . . .

The young wife and mother, at the head of some establishment, with a kind husband to shield her from the adverse winds of life, with wealth, fortune and position, has a certain harbor of safety, secure against the ordinary ills of life. But to manage a household, have a desirable influence in society, keep her friends and the affections of her husband, train her children and servants well, she must have rare common sense, wisdom, diplomacy, and a knowledge of human nature. To do all this, she needs the cardinal virtues and the strong points of character that the most successful statesman possesses. An uneducated woman trained to dependence, with no resources in herself, must make a failure of any position in life. But society says women do not need a knowledge of the world, the liberal training that experience in public life must give, all the advantages of collegiate education; but when for the lack of all this, the woman's happiness is wrecked, alone she bears her humiliation; and the solitude of the weak and the ignorant is indeed pitiable. In the wild chase for the prizes of life, they are ground to powder.

In age, when the pleasures of youth are passed, children grown up, married and gone, the hurry and bustle of life in a measure over, when the hands are weary of active service, when the old arm chair and the fireside are the chosen resorts, then men and women alike must fall hack on their own resources. If they cannot find companionship in books, if they have no interest in the vital questions of the hour, no interest in watching the consummation of reforms with which they might have been identified, they soon pass into their dotage. The more fully the faculties of the mind are developed and kept in use, the longer the period of vigor and active interest in all around us continues. If, from a life-long participation in public affairs, a woman feels responsible for the laws regulating our system of education, the discipline of our jails and prisons, the sanitary condition of our private homes, public buildings and thoroughfares, an interest in commerce, finance, our foreign relations, in any or all these questions, her solitude will at least be respectable, and she will not be driven to gossip or scandal for entertainment.

The chief reason for opening to every soul the doors to the whole round of human duties and pleasures is the individual development thus attained, the resources thus provided under all circumstances to mitigate the solitude that at times must come to everyone. . . .

Inasmuch, then, as woman shares equally the joys and sorrows of time and eternity, is it not the height of presumption in man to propose to represent her at the ballot box and the throne of grace, to do her voting in the state, her praying in the church, and to assume the position of high priest at the family altar?

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded--a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position. Conceding, then, that the responsibilities of life rest equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, and to conquer. Such are the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of individual sovereignty. Rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, virtuous and vicious, man and woman; it is ever the same, each soul must depend wholly on itself.

Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life, he cannot bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world; no one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.

From the mountain-tops of Judea long ago, a heavenly voice bade his disciples, "Bear ye one another's burdens"; but humanity has not yet risen to that point of self-sacrifice; and if ever so willing, how few the burdens are that one soul can bear for another! . . .

So it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, in the long, weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity, to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone.

But when all artificial trammels are removed, and women are recognized as individuals, responsible for their own environments, thoroughly educated for all positions in life they may be called to fill; with all the resources in themselves that liberal thought and broad culture can give; guided by their own conscience and judgment, trained to self-protection, by a healthy development of the muscular system, and skill in the use of weapons and defence; and stimulated to self-support by a knowledge of the business world and the pleasure that pecuniary independence must ever give; when women are trained in this way, they will in a measure be fitted for those hours of solitude that come alike to all, whether prepared or otherwise. As in our extremity we must depend on ourselves, the dictates of wisdom point to complete individual development.

In talking of education, how shallow the argument that each class must be educated for the special work it proposes to do, and that all those faculties not needed in this special work must lie dormant and utterly wither for want of use, when, perhaps, these will be the very faculties needed in life's greatest emergencies! Some say, "Where is the use of drilling girls in the languages, the sciences, in law, medicine, theology. As wives, mothers, housekeepers, cooks, they need a different curriculum from boys who are to fill all positions. The chief cooks in our great hotels and ocean steamers are men. In our large cities, men run the bakeries; they make our bread, cake and pies. They manage the laundries; they are now considered our best milliners and dressmakers. Because some men fill these departments of usefulness, shall we regulate the curriculum in Harvard and Yale to their present necessities? If not, why this talk in our best colleges of a curriculum for girls who are crowding into the trades and professions, teachers in all our public schools, rapidly filling many lucrative and honorable positions in life?". . .

Women are already the equals of men in the whole realm of thought, in art, science, literature and government. . . . The poetry and novels of the century are theirs, and they have touched the keynote of reform, in religion, politics and social life. They fill the editor's and professor's chair, plead at the bar of justice, walk the wards of the hospital, speak from the pulpit and the platform. Such is the type of womanhood that an enlightened public sentiment welcomes to-day, and such the triumph of the facts of life over the false theories of the past.

Is it, then, consistent to hold the developed woman of this day within the same narrow political limits as the dame with the spinning wheel and knitting needle occupied in the past? No, no! Machinery has taken the labors of woman as well as man on its tireless shoulders; the loom and the spinning wheel are but dreams of the past; the pen, the brush, the easel, the chisel, have taken their places, while the hopes and ambitions of women are essentially changed.

We see reason sufficient in the outer conditions of human beings for individual liberty and development, but when we consider the self-dependence of every human soul, we see the need of courage, judgment and the exercise of every faculty of mind and body, strengthened and developed by use, in woman as well as man.

Whatever may be said of man's protecting power in ordinary conditions, amid all the terrible disasters by land and sea, in the supreme moments of danger, alone woman must ever meet the horrors of the situation. The Angel of Death even makes no royal pathway for her. Man's love and sympathy enter only into the sunshine of our lives. In that solemn solitude of self, that links us with the immeasurable and the eternal, each soul lives alone forever. A recent writer says: "I remember once, in crossing the Atlantic, to have gone upon the deck of the ship at midnight, when a dense black cloud enveloped the sky, and the great deep was roaring madly under the lashes of demoniac winds. My feeling was not of danger or fear (which is a base surrender of the immortal soul) but of utter desolation and loneliness; a little speck of life shut in by a tremendous darkness. . . ."

And yet, there is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum of the oracle; the hidden chamber of Eleusinian mystery, for to it only omniscience is permitted to enter.

Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul? ____________________________________________________________

I don't know if Joss has ever read "The Solitude of Self," but Mrs. Stanton's words permeate every frame of his beloved brainchild.

3. "Alone she goes to the gates of death...."

In the end, it's all about Buffy. All through Season 7, we have seen her searching for a new way to relate to her world, leaving behind the old truths exemplified by the Shadowmen and the Watcher's Council, and finally taking her rightful place as the general of her own life. But she's still influenced by the past to the degree that she doesn't know how to forge ahead in a new direction. I think this is where all of the recent posts about the Dark Feminine will come in. I believe Buffy will revisit the circumstances of Becoming and Anne, as the slow process of alienation from her friends in S7 will culminate in a total break--and a metaphysical quest into the recesses of her own mind and heart. It is there that she will find the answers to the impossible question of the First Evil, in the dark power she's feared for the length of the series. And when she emerges from the quest, she will share her joy with her friends and the world--because Buffy will realize (once again) that it's her friends who give her the support and love to face the decisions we all face alone.

It is the only possible ending for Buffy the character, because it is the only possible ending for Joss and the series as well. Joss has had Buffy inside of his head for the past ten to fifteen years, creating a complex and unique universe, and perhaps his greatest joy has been to share his creation with the world. I'm reminded (as usual) of a Jorge Luis Borges story, "The Secret Miracle," in which a Czech playwright is about to be executed by the Germans, and prays to God for the time to finish his masterpiece. The soldiers take aim, but the guns do not go off; in fact, the entire physical universe is suspended, leaving the writer alone with his consciousness. He spends a year constructing the play in his head, cutting and rewriting when necessary, adjusting the style and the plot until it is absolute perfection. And when the play is complete, down to the last detail, time resumes its course, and he is executed as pre-ordained.

I get the feeling Joss would consider the events of "The Secret Miracle" a punishment fit for the last circle of hell. To finish your masterpiece and be unable to share it with anyone would, for Joss, constitute a perversion of art. Because even though we make the big decisions alone, every decision we make is an act of creation, rippling out into the world. It is how our acts of creation influence the other people in our lives that gives our lives meaning, and I think Joss will want us to know how much his own life has been enriched before the series signs off once and for all...OW