[Note: I’ve decided to begin a series about consent issues in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I will post a new entry in this series every other Tuesday – or perhaps on a weekly basis, if I have the time. In this series, I will look at an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that deals with rape, sexual assault, or consent issues as a main plot point or as a featured event of the episode. I will examine these episodes in chronological order. If, in my writing of this series, you feel that I have skipped an episode that should be a part of this series, feel free to submit a guest post, and I will consider publishing it.]
EPISODES: “Lie to Me” and “What’s My Line? Part 2”
INCIDENT: Allusions to past rape and abuse
PERPETRATOR: Angel
VICTIM: Drusilla
The specifics: In “Lie to Me,” Angel tells Buffy about his past deeds, including what he did to Drusilla. He describes his treatment of Drusilla as the worst thing he ever did when he was an unsouled vampire:
“First I made her insane. Killed everyone she ever loved. Visited every mental torture on her I could devise. She eventually fled to a convent, and on the day she took her holy orders, I turned her into a demon.”
In “What’s My Line? Part 2,” Drusilla reveals a little more about their history. Spike has delivered Angel to her so she can use him in a ritual, but she decides to torture him and play with him before she and Spike kill him. She tortures him by pouring holy water on his body, but also reminds him of all the pain he inflicted on her and her family. When Spike comes back to take Angel away, Angel describes his past sexual history with Drusilla.
“ANGEL: You shoulda let me talk to him, Dru. Sounds like your boy could use some pointers. She likes to be teased.
SPIKE: Keep your hole shut!
ANGEL: Take care of her, Spike. The way she touched me just now? I can tell when she’s not satisfied.
SPIKE: I said SHUT UP!
ANGEL: Or maybe you two just don’t have the fire we had.”
Angel does this to goad Spike into staking him, because he would rather die at the moment than be used in a ritual to restore Drusilla to her full strength. Subsequent episodes on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel will show that he wasn’t lying about their sexual history, and that Angel and Drusilla often slept together even when he was with Darla and she was with Spike.
I haven’t watched every episode of Angel, so I don’t know if what I’m about to say was ever proved by canon, but there’s no doubt in my mind that rape and sexual abuse was part of Angel’s torture of Drusilla when she was still human. He emphasizes that she was “sweet and pure and chaste,” and that’s one of the reasons he became obsessed with her – he wanted to undo everything that was sweet and pure and chaste about her.
The mind of the perpetrator: Angel has said that his treatment of Drusilla was the worst thing he had ever done. He regrets his actions against her more than anything else. This is why, in “Lie to Me,” he warns her to take Spike and leave town instead of killing her. He knows that Drusilla restored to her full strength is extremely dangerous, but he can’t kill her because he’s directly to blame for all of her actions. He didn’t simply turn her into a vampire; he trained her to be insane and dangerous. Guilt isn’t his only motivating factor, though – I also believe he doesn’t want a physical reminder of what he did to Drusilla walking around in a town where he and Buffy both live.
These episodes combined with “Becoming Part 1” reinforce my opinion that is one creepy fucker. He was attracted to Drusilla’s sweetness and innocence and chasteness, and these are the exact same qualities that first attract him to Buffy when he sees her in “Becoming Part 1.” Soulless Angel wants to corrupt innocence and souled Angel wants to preserve it, but he’s still drawn to it either way. The lines between Angel and Angelus are not as distinct as he wants to think.
The victim’s perspective: In “Lie to Me,” Drusilla is disappointed to see Angel again because she knows he has a soul. She misses the torturing, evil monster that drove her insane and turned her into a demon.
“ANGEL: Drusilla, leave here. I’m offering you that chance. Take Spike and get out.
DRUSILLA: Or you’ll hurt me? No. No, you can’t. Not anymore.
ANGEL: If you don’t leave it’ll go badly. For all of us.
DRUSILLA: My dear boy’s gone all away, hasn’t he? To her.
ANGEL: Who?
DRUSILLA: The girl. The Slayer. Your heart stinks of her. Poor little thing. She has no idea what’s in store.”
In this last bit of dialogue, I can’t tell if Drusilla is using her psychic powers to foresee Angel losing his soul and hurting Buffy, or if she’s only using what she knows of Angel to predict that he will hurt Buffy.
In “What’s My Line? Part 2,” Drusilla tortures Angel and reminds him of all the ways that he hurt her. It sounds like she’s been holding back this anger and resentment for a long time. Yet four episodes later, in “Innocence,” where Angel loses his soul again, she couldn’t be happier to see him.
What does this episode say about misogyny and rape culture?
I’ve often thought that Drusilla is the most tragic character on Buffy, and that’s largely because of her relationship with Angel. I think her obsession with Angel is a commentary on molestation and Stockholm Syndrome. I’m not sure how old she was when Angel and Darla turned her into a vampire, but these episodes and a few flashbacks on Angel indicate that she was pretty young, maybe on the verge of turning eighteen. However old she was, the point is that she was “pure, sweet, and chaste” – qualities that made Angel obsessed with her, made him want to corrupt her innocence. When she was still human and sane, Drusilla was miserable and unhappy and suffering because of Angel’s torture. (Darla participated in the torture but the show makes it clear that Angel was the ringleader.) When she turned into a vampire, she enjoyed Angel’s brutality and wanted her vampire “daddy” to hurt her even more. She started to get off on the pain.
This change from hating her torturer to lusting for him can partially be explained by the transition from human to vampire. The things that made Drusilla miserable as a human turned her on as vampire. But I also think you can look at Angel and Drusilla’s history as an example of abuse victims becoming attached to their abusers. We hear stories of children not wanting to leave their abusive parents, having grown up with a perverted notion of what it means to love. That’s why Drusilla tortures Angel with holy water. She’s not only angry with him for killing her family. She’s angry with him for abandoning her and for not continuing to torture her. Angel leaving her means that he doesn’t love her anymore. Even though she loves Spike, she still misses the attention from her vampire daddy.
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Very succint; I’m glad you did not go the “Dru is sexy and perfect as she is” route, which is tiring. I wonder then about what attracted her to Spike? Am still re-watching the series but reading this has led me to question their relationship. Whedon often says that vampires are no longer who they were in life when they are turned (ref: Spike’s mother, Season 7) and so I wonder, given this relationship with Angelus, what drew her to sire Spike instead of killing him? Could it be that William (pre-Spike) might have been the kind of person human Drusilla might have been attracted to? What would that mean in terms of demon/vampire Dru versus original Dru? Just wondering 🙂
I’ll probably write a post at some point about the vampire mythology on the show, because honestly, I think it’s patent bullshit that vampires are completely different than they were as humans. Harmony alone refutes this premise; she’s exactly the same as a vampire as she was as a human. Jesse was a geek as a human but suave as a vampire, but his desire was still the same: he still wanted Cordelia. Angel with a soul and Angel without a soul were equally obsessed with Buffy.
To answer your question about Dru, though, I think she was drawn to William’s poetic soul for a multitude of reasons: she finds it genuinely attractive, she wants to pervert that innocence in the way Angel perverted hers, and she can tell that he’ll worship her and be devoted to her.