Given the unmitigated horror of Angelus’s actions, we want clear-cut an- swers. And his victims understandably want justice. Unfortunately, however, this might be a case where there is no justice to be had, as Angel himself recognizes:
Holtz: I will have justice.
Angel: No, I don’t think you will. There’s no justice for the things I did to you. (Angel: “Lullaby”)
In fact, there is something deeply ironic about the gypsy’s curse that restores Angel’s soul. By its very nature the curse is unable to achieve its intended purpose of causing Angelus torment. In one way of looking at things, Angelus’s soul sends him out of existence and creates a new vampire. Angel, not Angelus, is thus the one who undergoes perpetual suffering. But even if Angel is identical to Angelus, by restoring the vampire’s soul the curse itself has caused such psychological disconnect that the gypsies still seem to miss their target. Either way, the curse in and of itself ensures that its victim does not bear responsibility for the acts that motivated it in the first place.
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Can we go so far as to say that the curse does Angel an injustice, that it is unjust for the gypsies to have caused him this perpetual suffering as revenge for acts for which he bears no responsibility? Here we might usefully recall the famous claim of John Stuart Mill: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (2001, x). Surely, too, it is better to be Angel burdened by suffering than to be Angelus unburdened. As hard as it often is to have a soul, Angel is better off with one than without one—and so, too, are we all.
Notes
My epigraph is taken from Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Pocket, 2003), 324. 1. The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is loosely based on the 1992 movie of the same name, also written by Joss Whedon. Other than Buffy, who is played by Kristy Swanson in the movie, there is no character crossover between the movie and the television show.
2. Interestingly, Buffy herself—while not a monster—also fits the description of metaphysical misfit. She is human but superhuman. And she, too, is both living and dead, having been brought back from death . . . twice. She experiences clinical death in the season 1 finale before ultimately being revived. She is also killed (and buried) in the season 5 finale, though she is brought back from the dead through dark magic the following season.
3. In addition to the categorical transgressions already noted, Cynthia Freeland (among others) has argued that the vampire also “violates the norms of femininity and masculinity.” According to Freeland, “Vampires are polymorphously perverse: In their search for blood, they can find physical intimacy with a person of almost any gender, age, race, or social class. . . . Transgressive and violent eroticism links the vampire’s monstrousness to revolution against norms established by patriarchal institutions of religion, science, law, and the nuclear family” (2000, 124).
4. Having sired Darla, who in turns sires Angelus, the Master is essentially Angelus’s vampiric grandfather.
5. The vampire Spike (James Marsters), who regains his soul at the end of Buffy, season 6, subsequently descends into madness as a result. As he describes the experi- ence, “They put the spark back in and now all it does is burn” (“Beneath You”). The case of Spike raises several interesting issues of its own, but I do not have the space here to pursue them.
6. To simplify matters I will always refer to the soulless vampire as Angelus and the ensouled vampire as Angel.
7. Walter Glannon concludes something similar about individuals who suffer from disorders like schizophrenia or manic depression. These illnesses cause what he describes as “recurrent” or “successive” selves: “The self with normal mental states
100 Amy Kind
develops into the self of schizophrenic delusion, which then once again returns to the self of normal mental states, and similarly for the self that moves back and forth between depressed and manic phases.” In some cases these disorders may cause such severe breaks in psychological continuity between these selves that “affected individu- als effectively become different persons from what they were at an earlier time” (1998, 240; my emphasis) And Schechtman argues that it is “at least uncontroversial to claim that in Multiple Personality Disorder we are not presented unproblematically with a single person. The fact that these cases seem to present, at least sometimes, genuinely independent streams of consciousness, which may have no awareness of one another, seems reason enough to say that there is some very important sense in which distinct persons co-occupy a body” (2005, 11).
8. For discussion of this claim, see Schechtman 1996, 14, 157–59; Sider 2001, 203–8.
9. Schechtman makes a similar point: in all of the alleged counterexamples, “we are holding the person responsible for actions that result from his prior actions, and so the assignment of responsibility for someone else’s actions is always via a more primary ascription of another action to the person who is being held responsible” (1996, 14).
10. See http://www.annerice.com/Chamber-Biography.html.
11. In defending his own biological approach to personal identity, Olson vigorously rejects this claim (1997, 57–62).
12. For further discussion of this point, see Shoemaker 2008, particularly section 5. 13. This is directly in line with Parfit’s (1984, 245–80) influential arguments that identity is not what matters for survival. According to Parfit, an individual may survive into the future even if no one exists who is strictly speaking identical to him.
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