By Malcolm Timbers
Because The Queen of Wonderland project involves analysing most of the episodes in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, it suggests that anyone who is interested in this project seek to acquire at least the first season’s collection of episodes. Sometimes these can be recorded from reruns on the television. Anyone who is sincerely interested in understanding the actual cause of anorexia nervosa is going to need both The Queen of Wonderland and at least the first season of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. If you don’t understand the reason for this, please read the Preface to the book, link to the right, near the bottom of the list of links, titled: About the Book.
This first volume of The Queen of Wonderland will only be analysing the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The introductory part of the book takes up half the book and explores the historic precedencies, method of analysis, a description of the symbolic meaning behind the themes and other things that the reader will need to understand in order to make sense of the analyses. These analyses will avoid psychobabble as much as possible, but the reader needs to become familiar with the concepts of the inherited archetypes and the shadow of the personality, which will be explained in easy to understand terms in the book. Besides the videos themselves illustrate the shadow’s relationship to the heroine in clear and unmistakable terms. Yet this most important aspect of the shadow is not discernable unless it is pointed out.
The aspect of the shadow that concerns us in this study is that aspect of the shadow as it pertains to an adolescent’s psychological development in the school setting. There is two reasons for focussing upon this aspect of the shadow. The one is because Buffy’s highschool is the setting for much of the Buffy series. The second reason is because the shadow of the personality is the aspect of the shadow that concerns us when trying to make sense of the problem of self-harming behaviour.
A muddle as to what the shadow is about can be acquired from reading some other interpretations of Buffy episodes where the term “shadow” is used in such a general way that it could only leave the reader with a very vague conception of what the shadow is about. This is because the concept of the shadow covers a lot of psychic territory. The Buffy videos combined with the analysis will give the reader of The Queen of Wonderland a clear picture of the aspect of the shadow that we are concerned with. This clear picture of the shadow will no doubt upset the sociological community because it is contrary to their world view, so expect some sort of backlash against The Queen of Wonderland from that realm of delusional authorities.
Another analysis that is going to upset the sociological authorities is the analysis of the Nightmares episode, which is about child abuse. Child abuse was a topic that reached near hysterical proportions in the media just before the Nightmares episode was written. It is also relevant that the Nightmare on Elm Street series started about the same time. Some of the episodes will take up many pages of text as some of these seemingly simple fantasies were unconsciously influenced by cultural events that took place shortly before or during the inception of the Buffy concept. These cultural events need to explained along with references because even people who lived through that era more than likely only have vague memories about the rumours and innuendos that were flying about during the 1980s and early `90s. Some of these episodes would be difficult to analyse without an understanding of the cultural events that were transpiring just before and during the time these episodes were written. This is because the works of writers and artists are very much a product of the cultural atmosphere as of the individuals’ own personalities.
I will be going back east to visit my folks in Pennsylvania during the month of September. Although The Queen of Wonderland is almost completed, I will not be able to format the book for printing until I get back in the beginning of October. This is because my book formatting programme resides on my desktop computer, which I cannot take back east with me. Then the book manufacturer will need about 3 weeks of lead time to produce a proof for my perusal and schedule to have the books printed. So, hopefully, the book will be ready for distribution sometime in November.
I know it has been a long wait since I put up a web site announcing the The Queen of Wonderland project, but I needed to do a thorough job on the presentation of this work because it is going to set a hostile sociological community in an uproar. One for their failure and resistance against understanding the actual cause of anorexia nervosa and secondly because this understanding is contrary to the very premise from which they work. They’re going to be hurt and, consequently, are going to want to strike back.
The sociological community had been focussing their spotlight overbrightly upon the fashion scene as the main cause of anorexia nervosa, but, as you will soon learn, fashion is not the cause of anorexia nervosa. The fashion industry is merely the sociologists’ scapegoat for their own failings. However, in stating this, I am not condoning the focus upon the thin image by the fashion industry. What I am alluding to is that fashion designers are possessed by the same demons as anorexics are themselves. I am using the word “demons” to mean mental disorder of sorts rather than using some long-winded, arcane psychobabble because terms like “demons” and “fairies” are part of a universally understood language.
I had no idea that it would takes this long to complete this project as I had a preliminary edition completed in October of last year. Then, while going through my research database in order to place references, I kept turning up references for which I had forgot existed. I wrote the book in a somewhat serendipitous manner as I had no idea where to start or even any idea about how to put together an outline for this project since I did not want to write the book in a complex psychological idiom that would be difficulties to understand. My initial attempt to write The Queen of Wonderland wound up with about 500 book length pages that I was no happy with because it was written mostly in a psychological idiom. But, as it turned out, it was necessary to write all that stuff down to organize my thoughts, so as to be able to rewrite it in a more or less fantasy idiom.
In January of 2010, I made an effort to go back to my original objective about writing in a fantasy idiom. I decided at that time to purchase season one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series to see if I could find anything relevant there and discovered a gold mine of themes that corresponded to what I had been attempting to write about. So after looking at all the episodes from that season I went on a shopping spree and purchased the rest of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series along with some other Gothic videos. These popular Gothic videos appeared to me to be unconsciously illustrating the problems that adolescents face in contemporary society in a symbolic fashion. By analysing this material, I was able to put together an entirely different rendition of the The Queen of Wonderland based upon what I had already discovered about the psychodynamics of self-harming behaviour and creativity.
I discovered that many of the themes found in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and the Twilight series parallel the same themes that occur in the fantasies surrounding self-harming behaviour. The main theme of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series centres around the mythological maiden’s descent into the underworld, which parallels the fact that the anorexic typically descends into a twilight state of mind where her symptoms mime the fantasies of tragic romanticism that are transpiring in her psychic background.
In The Queen of Wonderland I will also be mentioning some of parallel themes from the Twilight series, The Vampire Diaries series, the True Blood series along with Dracula, Mary Reilly, Nightmare on Elm Street series, The Queen of the Damned, Interview with a Vampire along with some other popular videos.
After the final movie in the Twilight series comes out as a DVD, I may decide to make a separate analysis of the Twilight series because it involves important themes that deviate from the pattern set out by most of the other popular vampire series.
Who is this vampire who is all the rage these days anyway? Chapter two of The Queen of Wonderland explains this archetypal character in detail. Chapter one tells about the bewitchment of the heroine, while chapter three tells how it all got started during the Victorian era with a story about of a child’s descent into the underworld. Chapter four explores how to understand the meaning of the themes in these popular Gothic stories. The remainder of the book analyses all but one of the episodes from the first season of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.
